What Are Regions and AZs?

Regions and AZs

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

• Regions are determined 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, and Image Management Service (IMS), are shared within the same cloud region. Regions are classified as universal regions and dedicated regions. A universal region provides universal cloud services for common tenants. A dedicated region provides only services of the same type or provides services only 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 so you can build cross-AZ high-availability systems.

Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between regions and AZs.

Figure 1 Regions and AZs

Huawei Cloud provides services in many regions worldwide. You can select a region and AZ as required. For more information, see Huawei Cloud Global Regions.

Selecting a Region

When selecting a region, consider the following factors:

• Location

  It is recommended that you select the closest region for low network latency and quick access.

  • If you or your target users are in the Asia Pacific area (excluding the Chinese mainland), select the CN-Hong Kong, AP-Bangkok, or AP-Singapore region.
  • If your target users are in Africa, select the AF-Johannesburg region.
  • If your target users are in Europe, select the EU-Paris region.
  • If your target users are in Latin America, select the LA-Santiago region.
    

    The LA-Santiago region is located in Chile.

• Resource price

  Resource prices may vary in different regions. For details, see Product Pricing Details.

Selecting an AZ

When deploying resources, consider your applications' requirements on disaster recovery (DR) and network latency.

• For high DR capability, deploy resources in different AZs within the same region.
• If your applications require low latency between instances, you are advised to deploy resources in the same AZ.

Regions and Endpoints

Before using an API to call resources, you will need to specify the resource region and endpoint. For details, see Regions and Endpoints.