AWS Global Infrastructure - Regions and Availability Zones
The AWS Global Infrastructure is built around Regions and Availability Zones (AZ). At the time
of writing this article, i.e. June 2016, AWS is present around the globe in 12 geographic
regions. These 12 physical geographic regions are:
Americas
Europe/Middle East/Africa
Asia Pacific
Northern Virginia
Oregon
Northern California
São Paulo
GovCloud
Ireland
Frankfurt
Singapore
Tokyo
Sydney
Seoul
Beijing
Information noteNote: Note that AWS has no Region defined in Africa yet. The closest are the European
regions.
AWS has several data centers geographically dispersed across each Region. An Availability Zone
consists of one or more of those discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking and
connectivity, housed within separate facilities. These Availability Zones offer the ability to
operate production applications and databases which are more highly available, fault tolerant and
scalable than would be possible from a single data center. The diagram below represent how the
Region and Availability Zones relate to each other.
AWS operates 33 Availability Zones within the 12 geographic Regions mentioned above as described
here.
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