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') to ('N. California', 'N. Virginia', 'Oregon')?

I can get a list of AWS region codes with the following snippet:

 from boto3.session import Session
 s = Session()
 regions = s.get_available_regions('rds')
 print("regions:", regions)

$ python3 regions.py
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']

Is there an equivalent snippet that would give me the AWS region names?

Answer 1

AWS just released a feature that allows to query for AWS Regions, Endpoints, and More Using AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store.

Using this feature and boto3, you can do something like this:

import boto3

client = boto3.client('ssm')

response = client.get_parameter(
    Name='/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-west-1/longName'
)

region_name = response['Parameter']['Value'] # US West (N. California)

To get all available regions you can first use get_parameters_by_path() using the following path /aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions.

Note: even though this is public data, it requires proper IAM permissions.