We play with a lot of the new stuff in AWS when it comes out to see what it does, how it works and to think about how we can incorporate it into what we do to remove manual effort.

Every now and again we see a feature documented and for some reason can’t seem to find the feature in the AWS console.

At this stage, it is often important we go and check whether that feature has been deployed to the region we are currently working in.

This is especially important as we work mainly in regions such as Sydney where we are often slightly behind the USA regions for functionally.

This time, it was the ability to auto join an EC2 to an AWS directory domain at boot up.

The friendly FAQ https://aws.amazon.com/directoryservice/faqs/ say:

Q: In which AWS regions is the “domain join” functionality available?
A: Domain join functionality is currently available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) AWS regions.

RTFM Doh!