Viewing instances by region and availability zone (AZ)

[jocull]

I believe this change would require API access, since I don't know where it could be scraped from. The information is very tedious to find. Here's the information I have available on how to determine if an instance type is present in a region + AZ:

The best advice we've had is to query the billing API. If cost != null, there are probably instances available

Is this something that would be possible to add? Thanks :slightly_smiling_face:

[cristim]

The AZ labels are randomly assigned and account specific, my us-east-1a can be your us-east-1b and someone else's us-east-1c and so on.

We may be able to count the number of AZs and display something like 2/3 if only available in two out of three AZs.

[jocull]

Great information to have - I was not aware of that :)

Feel free to close issue in this case or re-open as something more appropriate. Thanks for the response!

[cristim]

I don't know, would you find useful such a field indicating the number of AZs having support for each instance type out of the total number of AZs in the region?

[jocull]

I think that could still be very useful - most importantly if it's 100% of the AZs or not :smile: I like the example you provided of seeing "2/3 AZs" or something to that effect.

[burck1]

I would be interested in contributing to this feature. Can someone point me to where I can get started?

It looks like since this issue was opened AWS has released an API for this info. Here's the corresponding AWS CLI command: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/describe-instance-type-offerings.html

To list the instance types offered in a Region:

$ aws ec2 describe-instance-type-offerings --region us-east-1
{
  "InstanceTypeOfferings": [
      {
          "InstanceType": "m5.2xlarge",
          "LocationType": "region",
          "Location": "us-east-1"
      },
      {
          "InstanceType": "t3.micro",
          "LocationType": "region",
          "Location": "us-east-1"
      },
      ...
  ]
}

To list the instance types offered in all availability zones for a given account and region:

$ aws ec2 describe-instance-type-offerings --location-type availability-zone --region us-east-1
{
    "InstanceTypeOfferings": [
        {
            "InstanceType": "t4g.medium",
            "LocationType": "availability-zone",
            "Location": "us-east-1a"
        },
        {
            "InstanceType": "r5n.2xlarge",
            "LocationType": "availability-zone",
            "Location": "us-east-1d"
        },
        {
            "InstanceType": "x1e.2xlarge",
            "LocationType": "availability-zone",
            "Location": "us-east-1d"
        },
        {
            "InstanceType": "m5.24xlarge",
            "LocationType": "availability-zone",
            "Location": "us-east-1b"
        },
        ...
    ]
}

Since the Locations returned are specific to a given AWS account, we would also need to map those to the corresponding availability zone ids which are not specific to a given AWS account. This is the ZoneId in the following response:

$ aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --region us-east-1
{
    "AvailabilityZones": [
        {
            "State": "available",
            "OptInStatus": "opt-in-not-required",
            "Messages": [],
            "RegionName": "us-east-1",
            "ZoneName": "us-east-1a",
            "ZoneId": "use1-az1",
            "GroupName": "us-east-1",
            "NetworkBorderGroup": "us-east-1",
            "ZoneType": "availability-zone"
        },
        {
            "State": "available",
            "OptInStatus": "opt-in-not-required",
            "Messages": [],
            "RegionName": "us-east-1",
            "ZoneName": "us-east-1b",
            "ZoneId": "use1-az2",
            "GroupName": "us-east-1",
            "NetworkBorderGroup": "us-east-1",
            "ZoneType": "availability-zone"
        },
        ...
    ]
}

So we should be able to publish something along the lines of:

Name	API Name	Supported AZs
T3 Nano	t3.nano	use1-az1, use1-az2, use1-az4, use1-az5, use1-az6
M5 General Purpose Large	m5.large	use1-az1, use1-az2, use1-az3
C5 High-CPU 9xlarge	c5.9xlarge	use1-az1, use1-az2, use1-az3, use1-az4, use1-az5, use1-az6

[jocull]

The AZ aliases you have listed above are more deterministic now. The AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) lists what "your" account's AZs are vs. the deterministic AZ identifiers you see listed here above 😄

[burck1]

I've submitted a PR #544 with some screenshots.

[jxu]

Can the site sort by cost per region?

[EverettBerry]

@jxu currently it is scoped to a region but this would be an interesting addition. Are you trying to find the cheapest instance in a particular region? It seems like us-east-1 will always be cheapest.