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

Or don't make Ubuntu or this tool a requirement and simply do:

: "${EBS_VOLUME_AVAILABILITY_ZONE:=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone)}"
: ${EBS_VOLUME_REGION:="${EBS_VOLUME_AVAILABILITY_ZONE%%*([![:digit:]])}"}

Answer 2

If you work with json - use right tools. jq much powerful in this case.

# curl -s curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/document | jq -r '.region'
eu-west-1

Answer 3

For anyone wanting to do this with good ol powershell

$var = (curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/document | Select-String-Pattern "Zone" | ConvertFrom-Json | Select-Object -ExpandProperty "region")
echo $var

Answer 4

For finding out information about the EC2 you are logged into, you can use the ec2-metadata tool.

You can install the tool by following this link. After installing the tool, you can run

# ec2-metadata -z

to find out the region.

This tools comes installed with the latest (10.10) Ubuntu AMIs,

Answer 5

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]')

Answer 6

There is one more way of achieving that:

REGION=`curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/document|grep region|awk -F\" '{print $4}'`

echo $REGION

us-east-1