boto3 aws api - Listing available instance types

Question

Instance types: (t2.micro, t2.small, c4.large...) those listed here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-types.html

I want to access a list of these through boto3. something like:

conn.get_all_instance_types()

or even

conn.describe_instance_types()['InstanceTypes'][0]['Name']

which everything seems to look like in this weird api.

I've looked through the docs for client and ServiceResource, but i can't find anything that seems to come close. I haven't even found a hacky solution that lists something else that happen to represent all the instance types.

Anyone with more experience of boto3?

Answer 1

There's now boto3.client('ec2').describe_instance_types() and corresponding aws-cli command aws ec2 describe-instance-types:

'''EC2 describe_instance_types usage example'''

import boto3

def ec2_instance_types(region_name):
    '''Yield all available EC2 instance types in region <region_name>'''
    ec2 = boto3.client('ec2', region_name=region_name)
    describe_args = {}
    while True:
        describe_result = ec2.describe_instance_types(**describe_args)
        yield from [i['InstanceType'] for i in describe_result['InstanceTypes']]
        if 'NextToken' not in describe_result:
            break
        describe_args['NextToken'] = describe_result['NextToken']

for ec2_type in ec2_instance_types('us-east-1'):
    print(ec2_type)

Expect about 3s of running time.

Answer 2

The EC2 API does not provide a way to get a list of all EC2 instance types. I wish it did. Some people have cobbled together their own lists of valid types by scraping sites like this but for now that is the only way.

Answer 3

This information can be retrieved in the JSON provided by the recently-announced AWS Price List API. As a simple example using the Python requests module:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# List EC2 Instance Types
# see: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-price-list-api/

import requests

offers = requests.get(
    'https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/index.json'
)
ec2_offer_path = offers.json()['offers']['AmazonEC2']['currentVersionUrl']
ec2offer = requests.get(
    'https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%s' % ec2_offer_path
).json()

uniq = set()
for sku, data in ec2offer['products'].items():
    if data['productFamily'] != 'Compute Instance':
        # skip anything that's not an EC2 Instance
        continue
    uniq.add(data['attributes']['instanceType'])
for itype in sorted(uniq):
    print(itype)

Note that this might take a while... as of today, the current EC2 Offers JSON file ( https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonEC2/current/index.json ) is 173MB, so it takes a while both to retrieve and to parse. The current result is 99 distinct instance types.