AWS Regions

Amazon EC2 is hosted in multiple locations all over the world.

It’s quite straightforward that resources geographically close to the client are served faster, so you can immediately get the rationale of creating so many regions all over the world: getting resources closer to who asks them.

Right now, AWS has about 10 regions available, three of them in US and the others spread over Europe, Asia, Pacific and South America, but stay assured that more of them will be opened in the future.

For many of the AWS services, you will be asked in which region you want to deploy your resources.

For example, if you launch an EC2 instance, you will be asked in which region to host it.

Each region is totally isolated from the others, and they can talk only via the Internet.

Actually, Regions are so isolated that when you view your resources, you’ll only see the resources tied to the region you’ve specified: AWS doesn’t replicate resources across regions automatically.

For high-availability platforms and applications, we create cross-region application ontop of cross-availability zone replication.

What this means is that even if all availability zones within a region go down, the platform will recover in another region somewhere else in the world.