Amazon AWS Route53 Region: us-east-1

This is one of those things that seems hard to find even though it is in fact documented, so I thought I’d post this note in the hope that someday it will pop up on someone’s google and be helpful.

So, here are some keywords of note: This is about Route53, the DNS service in Amazon AWS, and the “region” field. The way I ran into it I was using the DynamicDNS feature in my router (pfsense), which can directly update a Route53 record. But it wants the ZoneID in this form:

REGION/ZONEID

I had a ZoneID — they look something like “Z2X8NGLIQTGFO4” (I’ve altered this from what my real ZoneID is of course). But I didn’t know what my region is. In general “my” (best/default) region is “us-west-2” but that didn’t work (generated a complaint about an invalid region). I couldn’t find any way to reveal what the correct region for my Route53 service was.

The reason is … all Route53 services are in us-east-1. That is in fact documented but you really have to dig into the AWS docs to find it if you didn’t already know where to look. So, since it took me a while to find, I wrote this note, in the hope that someone else might stumble onto it via google and get to this answer more easily than I did.

It’s extremely frustrating because the user interface will show you the ZoneID but seems to have no information at all on the Region. It would have been nice if they threw that in the info panel even though the answer is always just us-east-1. Oh well.