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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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