Regions and AZs

What Are Regions and AZs?

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 in terms of geographical locations and network latencies. 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 common regions and dedicated regions. A common region provides common cloud services that should be made available to all tenants. A dedicated region provides services of a specific type or only for specific tenants.
• An availability zone (AZ) contains one or multiple 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 support cross-AZ high-availability systems.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between regions and AZs.

Figure 1 Regions and AZs

Currently, HUAWEI CLOUD provides services worldwide. You can select a region and AZ as required. For more information, see HUAWEI CLOUD Global Regions.

How Do I Select 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 access rate. However, the Chinese mainland regions provide the same infrastructure, BGP network quality, as well as resource operations and configurations. Therefore, if you or your target users are in the Chinese mainland, you do not need to consider the network latency differences when selecting a region.

  The countries and regions outside the Chinese mainland, such as Bangkok and Hong Kong, provide services for users outside the Chinese mainland. If you or your target users are in the Chinese mainland, these regions are not recommended due to high access latency.

  • 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 you or your target users are in Africa, select the AF-Johannesburg region.
  • If you or your target users are in Europe, select the EU-Paris region.
• Resource Price

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

How Do I Select an AZ?

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

Regions and Endpoints

When using an API to use resources, you must specify its region and endpoint. For details about HUAWEI CLOUD regions and endpoints, see Regions and Endpoints.