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 defined by their 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. There are universal regions and dedicated regions. A universal region provides universal cloud services for common tenants. A dedicated region only provides services of a specific type and only or for specific tenants.
• An AZ contains one or multiple physical data centers. Each AZ has independent cooling, fire extinguishing, moisture-proof, and electrical 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 regions and AZs.

Figure 1 Region and AZ

HUAWEI CLOUD provides services in many regions around the world. You can select a region and AZ as needed.

Selecting a Region

When selecting a region, consider the following factors:

• Location

  You are advised to select a region close to you or your target users. This reduces network latency and improves the access rate. However, since all Chinese mainland regions provide basically the same infrastructure, BGP network quality, as well as operations and resource configurations, any of them will work well if your users are located there.

Selecting an AZ

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

• For better DR resilience, deploy resources in different AZs in the same region.
• For lower network latency, deploy resources in the same AZ.

Regions and Endpoints

Before using an API to call resources, specify its region and endpoint.