How to look up an amazon resource using the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) as an identifier?

Question

With respect to an Amazon Resource Name (ARN) the AWS documentation states that:

Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) uniquely identify AWS resources. We require an ARN when you need to specify a resource unambiguously across all of AWS, such as in IAM policies, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) tags, and API calls.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-arns-and-namespaces.html

Question

Is it possible to look up a specific AWS resource using the ARN as an identifier?

For example if I was to use the SDK would it be possible to do something along the lines of:

Instance instance = AmazonResourceName.find(arnId); // look up via ARN?

If this is not possible, then the question becomes:

*What is the recommended approach for finding an AWS resources using the API? and What are the identifiers available for look up? *

Thanks

Answer 1

Have you looked at the AmazonEc2Client docs?

It has a describeInstances(DescribeInstancesRequest describeInstancesRequest) method that I think might suit your needs because the DescribeInstancesRequest can be set with ids as shown in the docs. This is untested but might be a good place to start.