Can you set a default console region in aws?

Question

I am setting up an account for a small organization and I decided to isolate the master account and create an admin IAM user. I set up the database and follow the tutorial to create an admin IAM user. I log in to the admin account later to verify everything looks good and don't see any services including the RDS instance. I go through the pain of verifying all of the details in the tutorials and more.

Turns out my console was just on a different region then the master account's console.

Seems like there ought to be either 1) a console view of all resources (across all regions so a true all resources view) OR 2) an ability to set a default console region.

Either of these would enable one to have a bit more sanity during management of their setup.

Treaty

You can bookmark a URL that takes you to a specific service within a specific region. Sometimes the console gets confused about the region when using 'global' service pages like Route 53, IAM and Amazon S3. – Luthern

@JohnRotenstein Thanks for the idea. Seems like a limited user interface that causes a lot of newbie headache IMHO. – Treaty

comment by @JohnRotenstein helped - i had erroneously bookmarked the wrong region and wondered why kept 'defaulting' to it – Rimbaud

Make a habit of setting the region first-thing after signing in. – Yeast

Answer 1

tl;dr: No. If you've logged into an account before, your browser caches the last region you were in for each service.

When you login to a new account the region isn't cached so it usually (service dependent) loads the us-east-1 / us-west-2 page.

+1000 for being able to set up a default console region either in the account, or in the AWS Organization for each sub-account/OU/the whole organization.

You can do it in the CLI, so why not the console? Seems like an easy feature add.

There's an old doc on it here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsconsolehelpdocs/latest/gsg/console-help-gsg.pdf

Edit: This isn't just an issue for newbies, it would save a lot of mini heart attacks when people log in to an account and think they're missing resources, only to find out they're in the wrong region!

Nieshanieto

Doesn't use cached region for me! Keeps defaulting to Oregon even when I switch to N. California. Every time, seriously. – Acidfast

Yeah we use RBAC and I can't bookmark. Another mind boggling miss by AWS. – Plessor

"this isn't just an issue for newbies". Been using AWS for a decade and this still trips me up – Enthral

It is currently possible. – Captor

Answer 2

According to the recent announcement by AWS, it is now possible to have a preferred/default region set. Read more here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/04/unified-settings-aws-management-console/

Euripus

Tested it and it works just fine, so voting up! Instead of adding another response with a screenshot, I added a screenshot to the edit queue for this answer. Hopefully someone will approve it. – Rheumy

It was difficult to find since it's not in the default 'settings'. However, it also does not work reliably; at least when switching accounts, it regularly reverts back to the old crap. – Sheepwalk

this worked for me. i was able to switch my default region with this step, thanks – Measure

The UI is extremely laborious to navigate unfortunately and seems to have changed since that doc came out. I found the settings page at us-east-2.console.aws.amazon.com/settings/… – Decorative

Answer 3

To expand on Sudhanshu's answer, you can now change you're preferred region in the Settings from the top right dropdown...

Then Edit the Localisation section...

Notice it's usually set to Last used region...

Means

Answer 4

Execute in the console:

aws configure set default.region us-east-2

Sandrasandro