MEPX
Chapter 5 of 10All chapters
  1. 1What the cloud is
  2. 2Service models
  3. 3Compute
  4. 4Storage and data
  5. 5Regions and zones
  6. 6Cloud networking
  7. 7Identity and access
  8. 8Cost
  9. 9Infrastructure as code
  10. 10Running things

Chapter 5 of 10

Regions and zones

Where your servers physically are.

Geography matters

A region is a geographic area; an availability zone is an isolated data centre within it. Spreading across zones survives one building's failure and costs almost nothing.

  • Pick a region close to your users: latency is set by distance.
  • Data residency law may decide the region for you.

Multi-region

Running in several regions survives a regional outage and multiplies complexity, because data now has to be kept in sync across long distances. Few products need it.