AWS Certified Developer — Exam Series —AWS Regions and Availability Zones
I am decided to take my AWS Certified Cloud Developer Associate exam in the coming March 2021. Thus, I am taking a course now on Udemy and prepare myself for the exam.
This post summarized the key points of learning on AWS Regions and Availability Zones. Besides, I have also made a mind map for easier revision afterward. Without further ado, let’s start.
Region
What is Region?
AWS introduced the concept of the region where it is actually a cluster group of data centers in a certain location
For example, we have regions such as Asia Pacific Southeast (Singapore), US East (Ohio) and etc.
Why AWS introduces so many regions?
It allows us to choose our application to deploy in which region. For example, if 70% of your user traffics is coming from Malaysia. It would be best to deploy your application in the Asia Pacific Southeast (Singapore) region instead of the US East. It allows your users to enjoy a faster speed to the application.
What is the difference between each region?
Most AWS services are region-scoped. There could be a service that you’re looking for is not available in your region. However, there is still a workaround for it, which is to switch the region. You can use that particular services by switching to the region that offers the services.
For e.g, AWS Amplify is unavailable in South Africa (Cape Town) region. But it’s available in the Asia Pacific Southeast region & most of the other region as well.
Availability Zones (AZs)
What is Availability Zones?
An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. — AWS Documentation. Each region contains at least 2 AZs, usually 3, and a maximum of 6. AZ normally separates from each other.
Why we have multiple AZs?
AZs is basically providing redundancy and allow fault tolerance. Imagine the data center was collapsed due to an earthquake, your application can move to other AZs without any impact to your existing business.
Why AZs are separate from each other?
Physical isolation is to ensure high availability. Using the earthquake example again, if all AZs for a region sit next to each other, it would be a high chance that all application in that region would be down.
Here is the mind map version for AWS Regions and Availability Zones.
If you think the mind map is helpful and adding value, feel free to download it here.
Conclusion
Here are some of the key points from this post.
- A region is a cluster group of data centers in an area of physical location.
- Most AWS services are region-scoped. There could be some services unavailable in your region.
- Each region has multiple Availability Zones, at least 2, usually 3, and a maximum of up to 6.
- AZs separate from each other so we can isolate disaster.
- The benefits of AZs are high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance.
Thank you for reading and see you in the next article.
