We're sorry but this app doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.

This lesson's interactive features are locked, please to keep using them

Regions and Availability Zones

AWS has many regions to choose from. Each region is where your services are geographically located.

  • An outage in one region will (usually) not affect another region.
  • The farther a server is from the user, the higher the latency. Choose a region close to the folks using your service.
  • Some services are available only in certain places, or are significantly more expensive in some regions. So we need to make sure a region meets our needs.
  • As a service grows, we may want to host in more than one region. We also pay a toll for transferring data between regions.

Availability Zones (AZs)

Each region is split into "zones," which means separate infrastructure within the same region.

  • An outage in one zone will (usually) not affect servers hosted in another zone.
  • We pay a toll for transferring data between zones.

Assignment

Set your default AWS region to us-east-1.

Cost check: Listing regions and availability zones is free, and changing your default region is also free.

  1. aws ec2 describe-regions --output table
    

    Press "q" to quit when you're done looking at the output.

  2. aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --output table
    
  3. aws configure set region us-east-1
    
  4. aws configure get region
    
    You should now see us-east-1 as the output.

Run and submit the CLI tests.