Where does Ali Cloud keep a full list of availability zones? - alibaba-cloud

Question

Alibaba Cloud's help page for regions gives you the full list of regions. That is helpful. It is also helpful that they tell you how many availability zones are in each region.
What is NOT helpful is that they fail to list the names of each availability zone. Twenty minutes of googling is way too long to spend on this. Where is the full list of availability zones for Ali Cloud/ Aliyun?

Answer 1

As of this writing there does not seem to be an easily accessible list of all availability zones by region for Aliyun. To get the full list you will need to pull it down with their Ali Cloud CLI tool.
It will spit out a wall of JSON, so it is also helpful to be on *nix and have the jq tool available.
Given all that, all you need is this short shell script:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
for region in $( aliyun ecs DescribeRegions | jq '.Regions.Region[].RegionId' )
do
echo $region
reg=$( echo $region | sed s/\"//g )
echo '---'
for zone in $( aliyun ecs DescribeZones --RegionId $reg | jq '.Zones.Zone[].ZoneId' | sort )
do
echo $zone
done
echo ''
done
The output of which is as follows.
"cn-qingdao"
---
"cn-qingdao-b"
"cn-qingdao-c"
"cn-beijing"
---
"cn-beijing-a"
"cn-beijing-b"
"cn-beijing-c"
"cn-beijing-d"
"cn-beijing-e"
"cn-beijing-f"
"cn-beijing-g"
"cn-zhangjiakou"
---
"cn-zhangjiakou-a"
"cn-zhangjiakou-b"
"cn-huhehaote"
---
"cn-huhehaote-a"
"cn-huhehaote-b"
"cn-hangzhou"
---
"cn-hangzhou-b"
"cn-hangzhou-c"
"cn-hangzhou-d"
"cn-hangzhou-e"
"cn-hangzhou-f"
"cn-hangzhou-g"
"cn-hangzhou-h"
"cn-shanghai"
---
"cn-shanghai-a"
"cn-shanghai-b"
"cn-shanghai-c"
"cn-shanghai-d"
"cn-shanghai-e"
"cn-shanghai-f"
"cn-shenzhen"
---
"cn-shenzhen-a"
"cn-shenzhen-b"
"cn-shenzhen-c"
"cn-shenzhen-d"
"cn-hongkong"
---
"cn-hongkong-a"
"cn-hongkong-b"
"cn-hongkong-c"
"ap-northeast-1"
---
"ap-northeast-1a"
"ap-southeast-1"
---
"ap-southeast-1a"
"ap-southeast-1b"
"ap-southeast-1c"
"ap-southeast-2"
---
"ap-southeast-2a"
"ap-southeast-2b"
"ap-southeast-3"
---
"ap-southeast-3a"
"ap-southeast-3b"
"ap-southeast-5"
---
"ap-southeast-5a"
"ap-south-1"
---
"ap-south-1a"
"ap-south-1b"
"us-east-1"
---
"us-east-1a"
"us-east-1b"
"us-west-1"
---
"us-west-1a"
"us-west-1b"
"eu-west-1"
---
"eu-west-1a"
"eu-west-1b"
"me-east-1"
---
"me-east-1a"
"eu-central-1"
---
"eu-central-1a"
"eu-central-1b"

Answer 2

Alibaba Cloud do have details about "No. of available zones under each region and services available in that particular region" in their website itself. Please have a look at Alibaba Cloud Website.

Answer 3

Agree, documentation is very poor and not readable, but i have found this - for those looking for a Python way:
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/elastic-compute-service/latest/describezones
I search everything i need in this URL ( make sure to hit the tab "All products" )
Which you can request with either:
https://ecs.aliyuncs.com/?Action=DescribeZones
&RegionId=cn-hangzhou
&InstanceChargeType=PostPaid
&SpotStrategy=NoSpot
&<Common request parameters>
Python example
And if you're using Python, there's the SDK:
https://pypi.org/project/aliyun-python-sdk-vpc/
I have found inside the package the following file ( which isn't documented anywhere as well )
import json
from aliyunsdkcore.client import AcsClient
from aliyunsdkvpc.request.v20160428.DescribeZonesRequest import DescribeZonesRequest
region = "cn-shanghai"
client = AcsClient(access_key, secret_key, region)
request = DescribeZonesRequest()
request.set_accept_format('json')
zones_list = json.loads(client.do_action_with_exception(request).decode('utf8'))
print(zones_list)
And with the sdk above i'm also querying the regions like so:
aliyunsdkcore is being installed as a dependency for aliyunsdkvpc no need to install
from aliyunsdkcore.endpoint.local_config_regional_endpoint_resolver import LocalConfigRegionalEndpointResolver
resolver = LocalConfigRegionalEndpointResolver()
regions_list = resolver.get_valid_region_ids_by_product(product_code='ecs')
print(regions_list)