Subscribe to AWS Public IP Address Changes via Amazon SNS

Last year we announced that the AWS Public IP Address Ranges Were Available in JSON Form. This was a quick, Friday afternoon post that turned out to be incredibly popular! Many AWS users are now polling this file on a regular basis and using it to manage their on-premises firewall rules or to track the growth of the AWS network footprint over time.  If you are using AWS Direct Connect, you can use the file to update your route tables to reflect the prefixes that are advertised for Direct Connect public connections.

Today we are making it even easier for you to make use of this file. You can now subscribe to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic and receive notifications when the file is updated. Your code can then retrieve the file, parse it, and make any necessary updates to your local environment.

Simply subscribe to topic arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:806199016981:AmazonIpSpaceChanged and confirm the subscription in the usual way (you can use any protocol supported by SNS):

You will receive a notification that looks like this each time the IP addresses are changed:

{
  "create-time":"yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss+00:00",
  "synctoken":"0123456789",
  "md5":"6a45316e8bc9463c9e926d5d37836d33",
  "url":"https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json"
}

You can also build a AWS Lambda function that responds to the changes:

In either case, your app will be responsible for fetching the file, parsing the JSON, and extracting the desired information. To learn more about the file, read about AWS IP Address Ranges.

If you build something useful (environment updates) and/or cool (an intriguing visualization) that you would like to share with the other readers of this blog, please feel free to leave me a comment!

— Jeff;

PS – My count shows 13,065,550 IP addresses in the EC2 range as of August 25, 2015.