Which instances are available in my region?
Thursday, March 10, 2016 Category : AWS, cloud 2
Have you wondered what the best way is to quickly list which instances are available in an AWS region? When the t2.nano was added to the Sydney region this week, I thought exactly this.
First place you would look would be the pricing page and select your region. However this only lists the latest instance types, you have to click through to another page to see the older generations. As a technical person you think "surely this can be done from the CLI"?
First port of call would be the trusty AWS CLI which I just love, its so handy. However there is no command which lets you extract the instances types. The closest you can get is to list the currently available reserved instances, for example
aws ec2 describe-reserved-instances-offerings --query "ReservedInstancesOfferings[?AvailabilityZone=='ap-southeast-2a'] [InstanceType]" --output text --region "ap-southeast-2" | sort -uProblem with this command is that there may be an instance type which does not have an RI available. When I was doing this t2.nano and hi1.4xlarge were not available for RI in Sydney. So the CLI is probably not the best solution here.
The only other possibility is the relatively new pricing file. This was created to provide a programatic interface to the pricing data instead of the nasty scraping hacks people previously performed. The pricing file for EC2 lists all of the instances available and looks something like this.
{
"formatVersion" : "v1.0",
"disclaimer" : "This pricing list [...]",
"offerCode" : "AmazonEC2",
"version" : "20160126001708",
"publicationDate" : "2016-01-26T00:17:08Z",
"products" : {
"DQ578CGN99KG6ECF" : {
"sku" : "DQ578CGN99KG6ECF",
"productFamily" : "Compute Instance",
"attributes" : {
"servicecode" : "AmazonEC2",
"location" : "US East (N. Virginia)",
"locationType" : "AWS Region",
"instanceType" : "hs1.8xlarge",
"currentGeneration" : "No",
"instanceFamily" : "Storage optimized",
"vcpu" : "17",
"physicalProcessor" : "Intel Xeon E5-2650",
"clockSpeed" : "2 GHz",
"memory" : "117 GiB",
"storage" : "24 x 2000",
"networkPerformance" : "10 Gigabit",
"processorArchitecture" : "64-bit",
"tenancy" : "Shared",
"operatingSystem" : "Windows",
"licenseModel" : "License Included",
"usagetype" : "BoxUsage:hs1.8xlarge",
"operation" : "RunInstances:0002",
"preInstalledSw" : "NA"
}
},
So with some use of jq magic to manipulate the json data we can extract only the instance flavors. Notice I am filtering for the region I am interested in.
curl -s https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonEC2/current/index.json | jq -r '.products[].attributes | select(.location == "Asia Pacific (Sydney)" and .tenancy == "Shared") | .instanceType' | sort -u
c1.medium
c1.xlarge
c3.2xlarge
c3.4xlarge
c3.8xlarge
c3.large
c3.xlarge
c4.2xlarge
c4.4xlarge
c4.8xlarge
c4.large
c4.xlarge
d2.2xlarge
d2.4xlarge
d2.8xlarge
d2.xlarge
g2.2xlarge
g2.8xlarge
hi1.4xlarge
hs1.8xlarge
i2.2xlarge
i2.4xlarge
i2.8xlarge
i2.xlarge
m1.large
m1.medium
m1.small
m1.xlarge
m2.2xlarge
m2.4xlarge
m2.xlarge
m3.2xlarge
m3.large
m3.medium
m3.xlarge
m4.10xlarge
m4.2xlarge
m4.4xlarge
m4.large
m4.xlarge
r3.2xlarge
r3.4xlarge
r3.8xlarge
r3.large
r3.xlarge
t1.micro
t2.large
t2.medium
t2.micro
t2.nano
t2.small
If you are just after the instance families a little more manipulation will get that too.
Enjoy.
Rodos
curl -s https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonEC2/current/index.json | jq -r '.products[].attributes | select(.location == "Asia Pacific (Sydney)" and .tenancy == "Shared") | .instanceType' | sort -u | cut -f1 -d. | sort -uNote you have to use the text descriptor of the region names and not the codes such as "ap-southeast-2". If you want to list all the region descriptors you can do.
c1
c3
c4
d2
g2
hi1
hs1
i2
m1
m2
m3
m4
r3
t1
t2
curl -s https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonEC2/current/index.json | jq -r '.products[].attributes.location | select(. != null)' | sort -uThere you go, a nice and easy way to pull instance types for a region. Well its easy if you cut and paste, its a relatively long command.
Asia Pacific (Seoul)
Asia Pacific (Singapore)
Asia Pacific (Sydney)
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
AWS GovCloud (US)
EU (Frankfurt)
EU (Ireland)
South America (Sao Paulo)
US East (N. Virginia)
US West (N. California)
US West (Oregon)
Enjoy.
Rodos
P.S. Thanks to the Solution Architects in the Sydney team at AWS who thought of using describe-reserved-instances-offerings in the CLI, turns out it is not as fruitful as the pricing file though.
