Finding an AWS Resource Over All Regions

If you have a lot of resources in AWS spread across multiple regions, sometimes it can be cumbersome trying to remember which resources are in each region. For the most part, the AWS Management Console only provides information on a given region. If you were tasked with enumerating all your EC2 instances worldwide, you'd probably have to go to the region pulldown and get a list for each region - 21 of them at the time of writing.

Using The AWS Search Feature

If you are a scriptwriter, like I am, you'd probably be tempted to write a script that used the AWS API to do this automatically, iterating over the regions. But just before I was about to embark on this spelunking adventure, which would have cost me time writing and debugging, I stumbled upon a useful search feature where you probably haven't looked before.

Resource Groups & Tag Editor

From the main menu or search find "Resource Groups & Tag Editor". Here you can create groups of resources based on tags or CloudFormation stacks and mass-edit tags on resources that share something in common. The Tag Editor itself provides a search engine where, while selecting a region, you call specify "All regions"…

You can choose a specific resource type, or "All supported resources", then narrow your search by tags. If you want to enumerate all your EC2 instances everywhere, select "All regions", "AWS::EC2::Instance" (you can type "instance" and it will give you matching choices), and leave the Tags section blank. Then just click "Search resources".

Economizing Your AWS Resources

You are probably using a lot more AWS resources than you think, so I don't recommend the "All supported resources" option. It is slow to begin with, and in one case where I have a single EC2 instance and a few ancillary items like a git repository, I have 190 resources allocated. A lot can be related to VPC subnets, etc. that get allocated by default even though you may not use them. Good news: they don't cost anything.

And as an added bonus, you can export the results as a CSV file. So, while it doesn’t provide a search engine with a lot of filtering capabilities to solve all your data diving quests, it's a good start.

Contact us at iuvo Technologies to learn more about this and other ways you can save on precious resources to make your company be more efficient.