[proposed enhancement] AWS us-west-2 checking method

[battistowx]

In some of our DAAC notebooks, we include the following Boto3 snippet to check if the notebook is being executed inside us-west-2, and throws a ValueError (with emojis) if you are not, preventing the notebook from being fully executed:

if (boto3.client('s3').meta.region_name == 'us-west-2'):
    display(Markdown('### us-west-2 Region Check: ✅'))
else:
    display(Markdown('### us-west-2 Region Check: ❌'))
    raise ValueError('Your notebook is not running inside the AWS us-west-2 region, and will not be able to directly access NASA Earthdata S3 buckets')

It may be useful to include a method that the user can call to check if they are in us-west-2 for direct S3 access and will throw an error like this, possibly using an fsspec transitive dependency, or the existing authorization checks.

[betolink]

This sounds great @battistowx we should pair this week or the next one if you have time, it should be a simple thing to implement with your code!

[battistowx]

Found methods to use requests to grab the current instance's region from the locally-linked Instance Identity Document, and it works great! https://gist.github.com/doublenns/7e3e4b72df4aaeccbeabf87ba767f44e

Wondering if this should be its own function that a user could call anywhere, or if it should be called only when an S3 granule is opened, which would print a detailed exception statement.

[JessicaS11]

I'd be interested in helping implement this in some fashion - we're updating related functionality in icepyx and I'd love to just put it upstream and then use it.

[betolink]

I think it would be great if we can expose earthaccess.__store__.in_region to earthaccess.in_region(default="us-west-2") and perhaps using an nicely formatted repr output besides the boolean value?

[JessicaS11]

Could someone clarify for #424:

was the spirit to check specifically for us-west-2, or to enable the user to see what region they are running in?

Thanks!

[chuckwondo]

Perhaps a silly question, but why do we need to make such an explicit check? I ran across another thread somewhere (I can't find it at the moment) where it seems that this is a hard problem (impossible in some cases?) to get such a check to work reliably/confidently in various environments.

What specifically is such a check to help a user do or not do or avoid?