How To Programmatically Get a List of All AWS Regions and Services
There may be times when you need to get a list of all available AWS regions or services. Cloud Snitch for example needs an up-to-date list of regions to be able to plot them on a map. There are repositories on GitHub where developers have attempted to maintain such lists, but inevitably they all become out-dated.
Fortunately, there are several ways to get what we need directly from AWS. This makes it far more practical to maintain up-to-date databases of regions and services. This article briefly goes over the most common ways to reliably get this information from AWS.
SSM Parameters for AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS publishes information about their global infrastructure via public SSM parameters under the /aws/service/global-infrastructure path. These parameters include all available regions, services, and more.
Listing AWS Regions
To get a list of all available AWS regions, you can use a command like...
aws ssm get-parameters-by-path --path /aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions
{
"Parameters": [
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-northeast-1",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "ap-northeast-1",
"Version": 1,
"LastModifiedDate": "2019-04-08T17:37:38.637000-04:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-northeast-1",
"DataType": "text"
},
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-southeast-5",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "ap-southeast-5",
"Version": 1,
"LastModifiedDate": "2024-08-21T13:08:58.686000-04:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-southeast-5",
"DataType": "text"
},
...
]
}These parameters are hierarchical, so you can drill down to get more information about a specific region like so:
aws ssm get-parameters-by-path --path /aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1
{
"Parameters": [
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/domain",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "amazonaws.com",
"Version": 1,
"LastModifiedDate": "2019-06-21T08:15:34.835000-04:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/domain",
"DataType": "text"
},
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/geolocationCountry",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "US",
"Version": 1,
"LastModifiedDate": "2019-04-08T17:37:50.856000-04:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/geolocationCountry",
"DataType": "text"
},
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/geolocationRegion",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "US-VA",
"Version": 1,
"LastModifiedDate": "2019-04-08T17:37:51.403000-04:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/geolocationRegion",
"DataType": "text"
},
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/longName",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "US East (N. Virginia)",
"Version": 1,
"LastModifiedDate": "2019-04-08T17:37:51.477000-04:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/longName",
"DataType": "text"
},
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/partition",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "aws",
"Version": 1,
"LastModifiedDate": "2019-04-08T17:37:51.541000-04:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1/partition",
"DataType": "text"
}
]
}Listing AWS Services
Similarly, to get a list of all available AWS services, you can use a command like...
aws ssm get-parameters-by-path --path /aws/service/global-infrastructure/services
{
"Parameters": [
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/services/arc-zonal-shift",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "arc-zonal-shift",
"Version": 1,
"LastModifiedDate": "2022-12-13T14:41:37.029000-05:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/services/arc-zonal-shift",
"DataType": "text"
},
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/services/codestar-connections",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "codestar-connections",
"Version": 1003,
"LastModifiedDate": "2020-03-17T10:38:01.897000-04:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/services/codestar-connections",
"DataType": "text"
},
...
]
}And you can drill down further like so:
aws ssm get-parameters-by-path --path /aws/service/global-infrastructure/services/ec2
{
"Parameters": [
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/services/ec2/longName",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)",
"Version": 2,
"LastModifiedDate": "2020-02-05T05:41:45.323000-05:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/services/ec2/longName",
"DataType": "text"
},
{
"Name": "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/services/ec2/marketingHomeURL",
"Type": "String",
"Value": "https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/",
"Version": 1,
"LastModifiedDate": "2020-02-07T15:32:06.856000-05:00",
"ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1::parameter/aws/service/global-infrastructure/services/ec2/marketingHomeURL",
"DataType": "text"
}
]
}Listing AWS Services Via Organizations Access Report
Based on your security configuration or private beta enrollments, your account may have more or fewer services available to it. As an alternative to using the global infrastructure SSM parameters, you can enumerate services available to your account by generating an organizations access report:
aws iam generate-organizations-access-report --entity-path o-myorgid/r-myrootid/123412341234
{
"JobId": "5acb5bc4-ae86-eef1-4553-9ae3564ab6d2"
}
aws iam get-organizations-access-report --job-id 5acb5bc4-ae86-eef1-4553-9ae3564ab6d2
{
"JobStatus": "COMPLETED",
"JobCreationDate": "2025-05-10T00:06:20.450000+00:00",
"JobCompletionDate": "2025-05-10T00:06:25.689000+00:00",
"NumberOfServicesAccessible": 11,
"NumberOfServicesNotAccessed": 0,
"AccessDetails": [
{
"ServiceName": "Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling",
"ServiceNamespace": "autoscaling",
"Region": "us-east-1",
"EntityPath": "o-myorgid/r-myrootid/123412341234",
"LastAuthenticatedTime": "2025-04-20T05:57:49+00:00",
"TotalAuthenticatedEntities": 1
},
{
"ServiceName": "AWS CloudTrail",
"ServiceNamespace": "cloudtrail",
"Region": "us-east-1",
"EntityPath": "o-myorgid/r-myrootid/123412341234",
"LastAuthenticatedTime": "2025-03-05T20:19:31+00:00",
"TotalAuthenticatedEntities": 1
},
...
],
}If your account is locked down using service control policies, your report will only contain the services you have enabled for it. For example, the report shown above only has 11 services listed, because it's been locked down using Cloud Snitch. For an unrestricted account, your report would contain several hundred services.
Listing AWS Regions Via the EC2 DescribeRegions API
You also have the option of using the EC2 DescribeRegions API to get a list of all available regions:
aws ec2 describe-regions --all-regions
{
"Regions": [
{
"Endpoint": "ec2.ap-south-2.amazonaws.com",
"RegionName": "ap-south-2",
"OptInStatus": "not-opted-in"
},
{
"Endpoint": "ec2.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com",
"RegionName": "ap-south-1",
"OptInStatus": "opt-in-not-required"
},
...
]
}And similarly, you can use the DescribeAvailabilityZones API to get a list of all available availability zones within each region.