Here’s a useful tip mentioned in one of the sessions at AWS re:Invent this year.
There is a little known API call that lets you query some of the EC2 limits/attributes in your account. The API call is DescribeAccountAttributes and you can use the aws-cli to query it from the command line.
For full JSON output:
aws ec2 describe-account-attributes
To query select limits/attributes and output them in a handy table format:
attributes=“max-instances max-elastic-ips vpc-max-elastic-ips” aws ec2 describe-account-attributes –region us-west-2 –attribute-names $attributes –output table –query ‘AccountAttributes[*].[AttributeName,AttributeValues[0].AttributeValue]’
Note that the limits vary by region even for a single account, so you can add the --region option:
regions=$(aws ec2 describe-regions --output text --query 'Regions[*].RegionName')
attributes="max-instances max-elastic-ips vpc-max-elastic-ips"
for region in $regions; do
echo; echo "region=$region"
aws ec2 describe-account-attributes --region $region --attribute-names $attributes --output text --query 'AccountAttributes[*].[AttributeName,AttributeValues[0].AttributeValue]' |
tr '\t' '=' | sort
done
Here’s sample output of the above command for a basic account:
region=eu-west-1
max-elastic-ips=5
max-instances=20
vpc-max-elastic-ips=5
region=sa-east-1
max-elastic-ips=5
max-instances=20
vpc-max-elastic-ips=5
region=us-east-1
max-elastic-ips=5
max-instances=20
vpc-max-elastic-ips=5
region=ap-northeast-1
max-elastic-ips=5
max-instances=20
vpc-max-elastic-ips=5
region=us-west-2
max-elastic-ips=5
max-instances=20
vpc-max-elastic-ips=5
region=us-west-1
max-elastic-ips=5
max-instances=20
vpc-max-elastic-ips=5
region=ap-southeast-1
max-elastic-ips=5
max-instances=20
vpc-max-elastic-ips=5
region=ap-southeast-2
max-elastic-ips=5
max-instances=20
vpc-max-elastic-ips=5