Region and AZ

Concept

A region and availability zone (AZ) identify the location of a data center. You can create resources in a specific region and AZ.

• Regions are classified based on geographical location and network latency. Public services, such as Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), Elastic Volume Service (EVS), Object Storage Service (OBS), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic IP (EIP), and Image Management Service (IMS), are shared within the same region. Regions are classified as universal regions and dedicated regions. A universal region provides universal cloud services for common tenants. A dedicated region provides services of the same type or only provides services for specific tenants.
• An AZ contains one or more physical data centers. Each AZ has independent cooling, fire extinguishing, moisture-proofing, and electricity facilities. Within an AZ, computing, network, storage, and other resources are logically divided into multiple clusters. AZs within a region are interconnected using high-speed optical fibers to allow you to build cross-AZ high-availability systems.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between the regions and AZs.

Figure 1 Regions and AZs

How to Select a Region?

When selecting a region, consider the following factors:

• Location

  Select a region close to you or your target users. This reduces network latency and improves access speed. However, Chinese mainland regions provide the same infrastructure, BGP network quality, as well as resource operations and configurations. If you or your target users are in the Chinese mainland, you do not need to consider the network latency differences when selecting a region.

  • If you or your target users are in the Asia Pacific area (excluding the Chinese mainland), select regions such as AP-Bangkok or AP-Singapore.
  • If you or your target users are in Africa, select the AF-Johannesburg region.
  • If you or your target users are in Europe, select the EU-Paris or EU-Amsterdam-OP1 region.
• Resource prices

  Resource prices may vary depending on different regions.

How Do I Select an AZ?

When determining whether to deploy resources in the same AZ, consider your applications' requirements for disaster recovery (DR) and network latency.

• For high DR capability, deploy resources in different AZs in the same region.
• For low network latency, deploy resources in the same AZ.

Regions and Endpoints

Before using an API to call resources, you must specify its region and endpoint. For details about Huawei Cloud regions and endpoints, see .