AWS Service Metadata
github.com/santtu/cloud-meta

For about 4–5 days I’ve been working through AWS’s news announcements, forum posts, digging through history with The Wayback Machine with the single goal of sorting out

• when an AWS service became available, and
• how many zones are available at any point in time.

I need this data for the work I’m doing on AWS service availability (see also here) for the simple reason that any pro-rated availability estimate will be impossible to calculate useless unless you know for how many service-hours a given service is actually available. Since not all services are available in all regions at the same time (or not at all) and some services expose the underlying availability zone (AZ) structure I just have to get those values.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem — at least I couldn’t find — any public dataset that contains all of this data in a well-researched format (or at all, for that matter). With “researched” I mean having a rationale for each data item in the dataset that can be tracked back and re-checked from original sources (or archived copies of those) if needed.

I got the dataset done and since although it is critical in my research, I really only have need for it once. So I decided to share it with everybody and put the dataset available under CC BY 4.0 license at https://github.com/santtu/cloud-meta. I hope someone will find it useful in their work or research.

Since a blog post without a graph would do, here’s a graph showing number of AWS services, regions and zones from the introduction of Alexa in 2004 up to a few days ago:

You’ll find the original data here.