# Module for describing availability zones?

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/module-for-describing-availability-zones/22183>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Tags:** aws\
**Created:** [August 1, 2016, 3:52pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/module-for-describing-availability-zones/22183 "2016-08-01T15:52:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![tom.moretto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3da27b/32.png) [@tom.moretto](https://forum.ansible.com/u/tom.moretto)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2016, 3:52pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/module-for-describing-availability-zones/22183/1 "2016-08-01T15:52:09Z")

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I’m not sure if I’m overlooking this or not, but is there a module from Ansible that will describe the availability zones in my AWS region?

I typically use us-east-1 as my default region, which has 5 available availability zones (A,B, C, D, E), out of which I can only use 4. I never know which ones are available to me when I stand up my VPC and create my subnets.

So my desire is to simply describe availability zones with an ansible module, and NOT pass the aws cli ec2 describe-availability-zones through with a `command` in my role.

Thank you.

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**Author:** ![Allen\_Sanabria1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@Allen\_Sanabria1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Allen_Sanabria1)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2016, 4:12pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/module-for-describing-availability-zones/22183/2 "2016-08-01T16:12:11Z")

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You can write a module or a simple filter that will give you the availability zones in a region.  
[https://github.com/linuxdynasty/ld-ansible-filters/blob/master/filter\_plugins/aws.py#L202](https://github.com/linuxdynasty/ld-ansible-filters/blob/master/filter_plugins/aws.py#L202)

So you can do something like this  
**zones: “{{ aws\_region | zones() }}”**

 ![](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/original/2X/3/39917ebf1406874f8a3b366c5923abee23e6cea6.png)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tom.moretto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3da27b/32.png) [@tom.moretto](https://forum.ansible.com/u/tom.moretto)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2016, 2:47pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/module-for-describing-availability-zones/22183/3 "2016-08-02T14:47:34Z")

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Thanks Allen!

I was trying to avoid creating anything custom, but it looks like a custom module needs to be made.

Thank you so much.

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**Author:** ![Allen\_Sanabria1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@Allen\_Sanabria1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Allen_Sanabria1)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2016, 5:22pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/module-for-describing-availability-zones/22183/4 "2016-08-02T17:22:52Z")

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A filter as I showed you above would be simpler, than a module imo.