AWS Regionality

AWS services are either Global, Regional or specific to the Availability Zone and cannot be accessed from outside.

Availability Zone

An Availability Zone (AZ) is a group of logical data centers, each one isolated from others.

Each Region has multiple AZs

  • if a region might be us-east-1, the AZ might be us-east-1a
  • note: other cloud providers might define a region as a single data centre.

Each AZ has independent and redundant power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks

  • this means that a company running its resources in different AZs get the benefit of high availability and fault-tolerance, since AZs are isolated from each other. Therefore, it's a good strategy is to spread partitions across AZs