AWS Regions List: What It Is and How We Fixed It

AWS breaks its global infrastructure up into clusters of data centers called Regions. These Regions are located all around the world and each one consists of several Availability Zones which are located within the Region’s geographical area. AWS is continually growing its global infrastructure and, as such, new Regions are constantly in the works; in fact, three new AWS Regions have been launched since 2020 and several more are on the way. When a new Region is released, it typically does not have all AWS’s services available immediately; AWS adds services to the Region over time. Additionally, AWS is also continually at work developing new services to offer its customers. When AWS releases a new service, it is initially only available in a single region (typically the Northern Virginia region, US-East-1) before being eventually rolled out to the remaining regions. As a result, each AWS service has a different list of regions in which it is offered and this list of regions changes as the service gets rolled out in new regions.

On the official AWS website, there is a table that contains information regarding which services are available in a selected region; however, this table has a few problems. The table can only present one region’s service availability at a time and does not support searching for specific services. This means that if you want to deploy a project in multiple regions, you would need to individually go through each region and manually search the list of available services to see if the ones your project requires are available in your desired regions. Below, we have included an example of the AWS regions list table, showing the services available in US West (Northern California).

Obviously, the official table makes it quite difficult to find out where AWS services are available. To solve this problem we built a tool and published at awsservices.info that allows the AWS builder community to easily query what services are available in specific regions and filter their searches by AWS service and/or region. Our tool contains a table showing the availability of a particular service in each region, text box inputs for searching AWS services and regions, a checkbox for hiding/showing availability in GovCloud regions, and a dropdown menu with three possible filters: show all services, only show services available in all selected regions, and hide services available in all selected regions. The two textbox inputs use a regex to filter the services/regions and take priority over the dropdown menu and government regions checkbox. This regex search functionality enables us to make more complex and effective queries. For example, we can now search for all services that are available in all European regions, or we could search for all regions that have Lambda, Datasync, WAF, and PrivateLink. The tool makes it easy to assess and determine where you can allocate your AWS resources. Below is an example query.

We hope you like this tool as much as we do. Feel free to send us your ideas for making it better, and happy building!