How to get the availability zone details for a running instance

I am iterating through the running instance list returned by DescribeInstances API. I would like to know how can I retriev开发者_C百科e the availability zone for each of these instances.

The availability zone can be accessed with:

instance.getPlacement().getAvailabilityZone();

Surprised no one has posted this yet, which is the best, fastest, and easiest way to do this AFAIK.

curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone

You cannot get the availability zone details for a running instance until those instances have connected with ELASTIC LOAD BALANCER (target groups).

There is no API for this:

I did it as follows: 1. Use API to get the current available zones. 2. Loop through the returned zones, set filter on DescribeInstances foreach of these and get the instance details.