AWS Architecture Blog·October 2, 2026Self-Hosting AWS Regional Availability Data for Multi-Region Architectures
This article introduces open-source solutions for deploying AWS Regional availability data within a customer's VPC, enhancing governance and control for multi-Region architectures. It addresses the challenges of tracking service availability across AWS Regions for resilience, compliance, and expansion planning. The solutions provide a self-hosted dashboard and workload analysis tools to personalize availability insights.
Read original on AWS Architecture BlogWhen building multi-Region architectures on AWS, understanding the availability of services, features, and API operations in each Region is crucial. This knowledge directly influences architectural decisions related to resilience, data residency, compliance, and expansion strategies. While AWS provides public data, many organizations require this information to be integrated directly into their own infrastructure for greater control and customizability.
The Challenge of Regional Availability in Multi-Region Designs
Designing highly available and resilient systems across multiple AWS Regions demands precise knowledge of service parity. Without an accurate and continuously updated view, architects face risks such as deploying services in unsupported Regions, failing to meet compliance requirements, or experiencing unexpected downtime during regional failovers. Existing AWS tools offer exploration and programmatic access, but often lack the in-VPC deployment and workload-specific filtering capabilities that enterprises need.
Self-Hosted Solutions for Regional Availability
AWS offers two open-source solutions designed to bring Regional availability data directly into a customer's Amazon VPC, enabling self-ownership and scheduled refreshes:
- Capability Insights for AWS: Deploys a searchable Regional availability dashboard into your AWS account. This dashboard, its API, and the underlying availability data run entirely within your VPC, refreshing daily from the AWS-published dataset. It covers service and feature availability, API operations, and CloudFormation resource types.
- Workload Analysis: Integrates with AWS CloudTrail logs and CloudFormation stacks to identify the specific AWS services your account utilizes. This significantly narrows the scope of Regional gap analysis, focusing only on the services relevant to your actual workload.
Architectural Benefits
By self-hosting this data, organizations gain enhanced control over data refresh schedules, integrate with existing security controls, and can potentially combine public AWS data with internal data sources for a unified view. This model improves governance and accelerates multi-Region expansion and disaster recovery planning by providing tailored, in-network availability insights.
Architecture of Capability Insights for AWS
The Capability Insights for AWS solution integrates with an existing VPC using public and private subnets. A client accesses the dashboard via an S3 gateway endpoint and interacts with the private API through an API Gateway VPC endpoint. An Amazon EventBridge schedule triggers a Lambda function (running outside the VPC) to fetch fresh Regional availability data from an AWS S3 access point and store it in a website bucket within the customer's account. This architecture ensures that data access and processing largely remain within the customer's controlled environment, minimizing external dependencies for data retrieval after the initial fetch.