from boto.dynamodb2 import connect_to_region
from boto.provider import Provider

aws_settings_provider = Provider('aws')

def create_connection():
    aws_region = # get the AWS region of the EC2 instance

    # connect_to_region passes along the named arguments to the DynamoDBConnection class that gets created
    return connect_to_region(
        aws_region,
        provider=aws_settings_provider,)

def get_item(key):
    connection = create_connection()
    # …Perform DynamoDB operations...