title: EC2 instance region via IP Address
body: <p>I'm trying to get my EC2 instances to communicate better with APIs of a 3rd party service. Latency is extremely important as voice communication is heavily involved &amp; lag is intolerable.</p>
  
  <p>I know a few of the providers use EC2, but the thing is Amazon's IP system makes it difficult to find which region the instance is in. With non elastic-ip services I could do a <code>whois</code> and find if it was in Australia or somewhere in Europe so I could put a server close by.</p>
  
  <p>With these elastic IP's how can I find which zone they're in. I can use ping times but its a bit of a guess and I have to make all these instances in different regions to find the shortest ping time.</p>