Regions
- What it is
- A separate geographic area containing multiple, isolated Availability Zones.
- Each Region is fully independent — an outage in one does not affect another.
- Key rules
- Data does not leave a Region unless you explicitly move it. Important for data sovereignty.
- Most services are Regional. A few are global: IAM, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF (for CloudFront), and billing.
- Some Regions require opt-in; a few (GovCloud, China) are entirely separate partitions.
- How to choose a Region
- Compliance and data residency — the hard constraint; decide this first.
- Latency — proximity to your users.
- Service availability — new services launch in some Regions before others.
- Cost — pricing varies meaningfully between Regions.
- When to use multiple Regions
- Disaster recovery and business continuity, global low latency, and legal data-residency separation.