Is there now a way to get “AWS region names” in boto3?

Question

Is there now a way in boto3 to convert AWS region codes to AWS region names, e.g to convert (\'us-west-1\', \'us-east-1\', \'us-west-2\'

Answer 1

Edit: As mentioned by @jogold, with the recent launch of Query for AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, I'd advise using that to directly query from AWS instead of the custom script in my answer.

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As per the boto3 docs, there is no native functionality for describing the colloquial names of the regions.

Here's a small script with a function, convertRegionCodesToNames(), that takes a list of valid region IDs and converts them to their common names. Add error handling as needed for invalid inputs, zero length arrays, or other possible responses returned by boto3.

# replace `regions` variable with the output from the get_available_instances() response

regions = ['ap-northeast-1', 'ap-northeast-2', 'ap-south-1', 'ap-southeast-1', 'ap-southeast-2', 'ca-central-1', 'eu-central-1', 'eu-west-1', 'eu-west-2', 'eu-west-3', 'sa-east-1', 'us-east-1', 'us-east-2', 'us-west-1', 'us-west-2']

def convertRegionCodesToNames(regions):
    # static dict of all region key-value pairs
    region_dict = {
      "us-east-1": "N. Virginia",
      "us-east-2": "Ohio",
      "us-west-1": "N. California",
      "us-west-2": "Oregon",
      "ca-central-1": "Central",
      "eu-west-1": "Ireland",
      "eu-central-1": "Frankfurt",
      "eu-west-2": "London",
      "eu-west-3": "Paris",
      "eu-north-1": "Stockholm",
      "ap-northeast-1": "Tokyo",
      "ap-northeast-2": "Seoul",
      "ap-southeast-1": "Singapore",
      "ap-southeast-2": "Sydney",
      "ap-south-1": "Mumbai",
      "sa-east-1": "São Paulo",
      "us-gov-west-1": "US Gov West 1",
      "us-gov-east-1": "US Gov East 1"
    } 

    for i in range(len(regions)):
        regions[i] = region_dict[regions[i]]

    return regions

converted_regions = convertRegionCodesToNames(regions)
print("regions:", converted_regions) 

Once added, running $ python3 regions.py will output:

regions: ['Tokyo', 'Seoul', 'Mumbai', 'Singapore', 'Sydney', 'Central', 'Frankfurt', 'Ireland', 'London', 'Paris', 'São Paulo', 'N. Virginia', 'Ohio', 'N. California', 'Oregon']