Regions
A region is literally a geographic region which contains 1 or more availability zones. AWS ensures that there are a minimum of 2 AZs in every region.
AWS has around 26 regions and 84 availability zones distributed across the world.
- Regions typically have names like
us-east-1,us-east-2,ap-southeast-2(Asia Pacific, Sydney), and so on. - Availability zones typically have names post-fixed with a character like
us-east-1aandus-east-1b.
Not all regions are equivalent. Some regions will access to services that are not available to others.