EC2 describe Images API takes a lot of time to return results

Question

I am currently using the AWS CLI to perform a DescribeImages using the EC2 API. My exact command is as follows:

aws --region us-east-1 ec2 describe-images --owners amazon --filters "Name=virtualization-type,Values=hvm" "Name=architecture,Values=x86_64" "Name=name,Values=amzn-ami-hvm-2016*x86_64-gp2" --query 'Images[*].{ID:ImageId,Name:Name,CreationDate:CreationDate}'

I specifically checked this twice or thrice and it takes about 14 seconds for this API to return results to me. Is this common or known?

Answer 1

The response time depends on the specificty of your query.

If you limit the request's owners, executable users, image ids or filters you can bring the response time down accordingly: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/describe-images.html