AWS organizes its global infrastructure into Regions (geographic locations) and Availability Zones (isolated data centers within a region). Understanding them is fundamental for designing applications that are reliable (fault-tolerant) and performant (low latency).
Regions — geographic locations
A REGION is a geographic area with AWS infrastructure (e.g. us-east-1 Virginia,
eu-west-1 Ireland, ap-southeast-1 Singapore):
→ choose regions based on: proximity to USERS (lower latency), data RESIDENCY/
compliance (where data must legally reside), service availability, and cost
→ regions are isolated from each other (a region's issues don't affect others)
