AWS RDS CLI: DB instances not listed

Question

I've created an IAM user (CLI only) with AmazonRDSReadOnlyAccess permissions. Now every time I try to list my db instances I get an empty JSON object, even though I have one active RDS instance:

aws rds describe-db-instances { "DBInstances": [] } 

Also I tried to specify my instance id (the instance identifier does exist for sure):

aws rds describe-db-instances --db-instance-identifier mydb An error occurred (DBInstanceNotFound) when calling the \ DescribeDBInstances operation: DBInstance vipbilet-db not found. 

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Most likely you’re querying a wrong region. Try aws --region us-east-1 rds describe-db-instances. Replace us-east-1 with the region where you have your instance.