Last Updated on May 2, 2021

I tried accessing the AWS Price List API using the Singapore region (ap-southeast-1) but it resulted the error Could not connect to the endpoint URL: "https://api.pricing.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/".

But whenever I use the N. Virginia Region (us-east-1) it works without any issues.

So on what regions will the AWS Price List API work?

TL;DR – AWS Price List API only works in N. Virginia (us-east-1) and Mumbai (ap-south-1) regions.

To answer this question I wrote a Python script that uses boto3 to check whether the AWS Price List API will throw an exception for each region.

The code below is a mix of the AWS List Regions and getting the region name for AWS Price List API scripts that we wrote.

import boto3
import json
from pkg_resources import resource_filename

def get_region_name(region_code):

    endpoint_file = resource_filename('botocore', 'data/endpoints.json')

    with open(endpoint_file, 'r') as f:
        endpoint_data = json.load(f)

    region_name = endpoint_data['partitions'][0]['regions'][region_code]['description']

    region_name = region_name.replace('Europe', 'EU')

    return region_name


if __name__ == "__main__":
    ec2_client = boto3.client('ec2')

    ec2_response = ec2_client.describe_regions(AllRegions=True)

    for region in ec2_response['Regions']:
        region_code = region['RegionName']

        pricing_client = boto3.client('pricing', region_name=region_code)

        try:
            pricing_response = pricing_client.describe_services()

            print('PASS', '\t', region_code, '\t', get_region_name(region_code))
        except:
            print('FAIL', '\t', region_code, '\t', get_region_name(region_code))

Output (arranged alphabetically)

FAIL   af-south-1      Africa (Cape Town)
FAIL   ap-east-1       Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
FAIL   ap-northeast-1  Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
FAIL   ap-northeast-2  Asia Pacific (Seoul)
FAIL   ap-northeast-3  Asia Pacific (Osaka)
PASS   ap-south-1      Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
FAIL   ap-southeast-1  Asia Pacific (Singapore)
FAIL   ap-southeast-2  Asia Pacific (Sydney)
FAIL   ca-central-1    Canada (Central)
FAIL   eu-central-1    EU (Frankfurt)
FAIL   eu-north-1      EU (Stockholm)
FAIL   eu-south-1      EU (Milan)
FAIL   eu-west-1       EU (Ireland)
FAIL   eu-west-2       EU (London)
FAIL   eu-west-3       EU (Paris)
FAIL   me-south-1      Middle East (Bahrain)
FAIL   sa-east-1       South America (Sao Paulo)
PASS   us-east-1       US East (N. Virginia)
FAIL   us-east-2       US East (Ohio)
FAIL   us-west-1       US West (N. California)
FAIL   us-west-2       US West (Oregon)

From the result above we can conclude that AWS Price List API will only work for the Mumbai Region (ap-south-1) and N. Virginia Region (us-east-1). It will not work in other regions.