Amazon AWS Concepts
Internal
Region
AWS has data centers in different areas of the world.
Amazon regions are: Asia Pacific (Tokyo) ap-northeast-1, Asia Pacific (Singapore) ap-southeast-1, Asia Pacific (Sydney) ap-southeast-2, EU (Frankfurt) eu-central-1, EU (Ireland) eu-west-1, South America (Sao Paulo) sa-east-1, US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1, US West (N. California) us-west-1, US West (Oregon) us-west-2.
Availability Zones
An availability zone is a distinct location within a region engineered to be isolated from failures in other availability zones. Think about it as location: by placing resources in different availability zones you can protect the application from the failure of a single location. Each region provides low-latency network connectivity with other zones within the same region. Example of availability zones within a region: us-west-2b.
How to find the availability zone: Execute Template:Ec2-describe-instances, the availability zone is listed as an INSTANCE field.
The services are available to use in different regions. Each region contains multiple distinct locations called availability zones. Each availability zone is engineered to be isolated from failures in other availability zones. However, an availability zone provides low-latency network connectivity to other zones in the same region.
AWS resources can be tied to a region or availability zone.
The list of zones and their codes is available here: [1]
Also see [load balancers|AmazonEC2#LoadBalancer].