What Are Regions and AZs?

Concepts

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 divided from the dimensions of 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 only or for specific tenants.
• An AZ contains one or more physical data centers. Each AZ has independent cooling, fire extinguishing, moisture-proof, 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.

Selecting a Region

If you or your users are in Europe, select the EU-Dublin region.

Selecting an AZ

When determining whether to deploy resources in the same AZ, consider your applications' requirements on 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.