Configure availability zone at runtime

[hackdna]

Currently us-east-1b is hardcoded: https://github.com/parklab/refinery-platform/blob/develop/deployment/volume_cfn.py#L31

This AZ is not available in our AWS account:

This results in failure to create the volume stack:

[drj11]

That's... entertaining. I knew that the actual availability zones are mapped to zone identifiers in a different way for each account (my us-east-1a is not your us-east-1a), but I didn't know the list of identifiers could be different.

But the documentation does indeed say that: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html#concepts-availability-zones

We'll probably need to use the describe-availability-zones command: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/describe-availability-zones.html

[hackdna]

Should we also make this optionally user-configurable (like Cloud Launch does in advanced settings)?

[drj11]

yes probably. I don't think that is so urgent though.

[hackdna]

I think we would need this for re-launching Refinery (given an existing EBS volume).

[drj11]

We already take measures to make sure the EC2 instance is launched in the same availability zone as the volume. #881