Regions and AZs

What Are 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.

• A region is a geographical area that shares common 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). Regions can be either general purpose or dedicated. General regions provide cloud services to the public, while dedicated regions are exclusively used for specific business or tenant services. Regions are divided based on geographical location and network latency.
• An AZ is a collection of one or more physical data centers that have independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. Within an AZ, resources such as compute, network, and storage are logically grouped into clusters. Multiple AZs within a region are interconnected through high-speed fiber optic cables to meet the demand for building highly available systems across AZs.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between regions and AZs.

Figure 1 Regions and AZs

Huawei Cloud currently offers cloud services in multiple regions worldwide. You can select ad region and AZ as needed. For more information, see Huawei Cloud Global Regions.

What Factors Should I Consider When Selecting a Region?

When selecting a region, consider the following factors:

• Geolocation

  Select a region close to you or your target users. This reduces network latency and accelerates access. 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 differences in network latency when selecting a region.

  Other regions and countries such as Hong Kong and Bangkok provide international bandwidth mainly for users outside the Chinese mainland. If you or your target users are located in the Chinese mainland, using these regions may result in longer access latency and is not recommended.

  • If you or your target users are in Asia Pacific regions that are outside the Chinese mainland, select the CN-Hong Kong, AP-Bangkok, or AP-Singapore region.
  • If you or your target users are in South Africa, select the AF-Johannesburg region.
  • If you or your target users are in Europe, select the EU-Paris region.

What Factors Should I Consider When Selecting an AZ?

The decision to deploy resources in the same AZ depends mainly on your requirements for disaster recovery capabilities and network latency.

• If your application requires high disaster recovery capabilities, it is recommended deploying resources in different AZs within the same region.
• If your application requires low network latency between instances, it is recommended deploying resources in the same AZ.

Regions and Endpoints

When utilizing resources through an API, you must specify its region and endpoint. For details about Huawei Cloud regions and endpoints, see Regions and Endpoints.