Regions and AZs

Concepts

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

Regions are divided 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 only or for specific tenants.
An AZ covers one or more physical data centers. Each AZ has independent cooling, fire extinguishing, moisture-proof, and electricity facilities. Within an AZ, compute, 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 Regions and AZs

Huawei Cloud provides services in many regions around the world. You can select a region and AZ as needed. For more information, see Huawei Cloud Global Regions.

Selecting a Region

When selecting a region, consider the following factors:

Location
Select the region closest to you or your target users to reduce likelihood of latency issues. Chinese mainland regions provide basically the same infrastructure, BGP network quality, as well as operations and configurations on resources. If you or your target users are in the Chinese mainland, it is not necessary to consider network latency differences when selecting a region.
Resource price
Resource prices may vary in different regions. For details, see Product Pricing Details.