AWS Regions and Availability Zones (AZs)

AWS global infrastructure is built around Regions and Availability Zones (AZs)

Regions and Availability Zones

Regions

AWS Regions are physically isolated geographic areas where AWS clusters data centers, designed to address data residency, compliance, and latency requirements.

Availability Zones (AZs)

Availability Zones (AZs) are distinct, physically separate locations within a single region, each containing one or more data centers with independent power and networking, designed to provide fault tolerance and high availability.

AWS CLI Example

aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --region us-east-1

{
    "AvailabilityZones": [
        {
            "Messages": [],
            "RegionName": "us-east-1",
            "ZoneName": "us-east-1a",
            "ZoneId": "us-east-1-az1",
            "ZoneType": "availability-zone",
            "State": "available"
        },
        {
            "Messages": [],
            "RegionName": "us-east-1",
            "ZoneName": "us-east-1b",
            "ZoneId": "us-east-1-az2",
            "ZoneType": "availability-zone",
            "State": "available"
        },
        {
            "Messages": [],
            "RegionName": "us-east-1",
            "ZoneName": "us-east-1c",
            "ZoneId": "us-east-1-az3",
            "ZoneType": "availability-zone",
            "State": "available"
        }
    ]
}