Find region from within an EC2 instance

Question

Is there a way to look up the region of an instance from within the instance?

I\'m looking for something similar to the method of finding the instance id.

Answer 1

A method using only egrep, which should work on most any linux instance spun up without having to install any extra tooling. I tested this against a list of all current AWS regions and they all match.

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | egrep -o '(\w)+-(\w)+-[0-9]'

Explanation of the REGEX:

• "(\w)+" This matches any number of letters
• "-" matches only a single dash
• "[0-9]" matches any 1 number

If you want this into a variable do:

region=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | egrep -o '(\w)+-(\w)+-[0-9]')