AWS Global Infrastructure public parameters

Parameter store is a AWS Systems Manager capability that provides a secure and hierarchical storage for configuration, data and secrets management.

In addition to application parameters, it is also used to store public parameters such as which AWS regions are active or a list of regions where a particular service is available. These parameters may not be needed with day to day operations can be helpful in certain scenarios e.g. if you are writing a tool. It can help to find out which regions are active or to find out an regional endpoint for a service.

AWS stores all the parameters at the path ‘/aws/service/global-infrastructure’

Below is an example to find the list of AWS Active regions using aws cli

aws ssm get-parameters-by-path \ - path /aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions \ - query 'Parameters[].Name'

This would return an output as

[
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/af-south-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-east-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-northeast-3",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-southeast-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ca-central-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/cn-north-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/eu-west-2",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/eu-west-3",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-gov-west-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-northeast-2",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-south-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-southeast-2",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/cn-northwest-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/eu-south-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/me-south-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/sa-east-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-east-2",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-gov-east-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-west-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/ap-northeast-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/eu-central-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/eu-north-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/eu-west-1",
    "/aws/service/global-infrastructure/regions/us-west-2"
]

Information about current-region can also be viewed as below

You might also be interested to checkout this blog that can help to read all the SSM parameters from parameter store at a specified path.