boto3 aws api - Listing available instance types

There's now boto3.client('ec2').describe_instance_types() and corresponding aws-cli command aws ec2 describe-instance-types:

'''EC2 describe_instance_types usage example'''

import boto3

def ec2_instance_types(region_name):
    '''Yield all available EC2 instance types in region <region_name>'''
    ec2 = boto3.client('ec2', region_name=region_name)
    describe_args = {}
    while True:
        describe_result = ec2.describe_instance_types(**describe_args)
        yield from [i['InstanceType'] for i in describe_result['InstanceTypes']]
        if 'NextToken' not in describe_result:
            break
        describe_args['NextToken'] = describe_result['NextToken']

for ec2_type in ec2_instance_types('us-east-1'):
    print(ec2_type)

Expect about 3s of running time.

The EC2 API does not provide a way to get a list of all EC2 instance types. I wish it did. Some people have cobbled together their own lists of valid types by scraping sites like this but for now that is the only way.