amazon ec2 - Find region from within an EC2 instance

Question

Is there a way to look up the region of an instance from within the instance?

I'm looking for something similar to the method of finding the instance id.

Answer 1

That URL (http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/document) doesn't appear to work anymore. I get a 404 when I tried to use it. I have the following code which seems to work though:

EC2_AVAIL_ZONE=`curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone`
EC2_REGION="`echo "$EC2_AVAIL_ZONE" | sed 's/[a-z]$//'`"

Hope this helps.

EDIT: Improved sed based on comments