Amazon AWS : Region and Availability Zone Concepts

Today I am going to start with the beginning as many of you asked about the Amazon Web services which includes the cloud services and the features provided by AWS. Before we start with the features and the services provided by AWS first we need to understand the basic terminology of the Amazon Region and Availability zones.

This can be the first lecture to understand the Amazon AWS and will be helpful for the candidates who are going to prepare the associate level of the certifications in Amazon AWS.

Regions
Each Amazon EC2 region is designed to be completely isolated from the other Amazon EC2 regions. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability. 

So here EC2 means the virtual machine instance, EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud instance which is similar to your VM. So don't be confuse in EC2 as it is the word use for VM in AWS.

Fig 1.1- Amazon AWS Region

When you view your resources, you'll only see the resources tied to the region you've specified. This is because regions are isolated from each other, and we don't replicate resources across regions automatically. Please make a note that there is a charge for data transfer between regions.

Availability Zones 
Let's talk about the availability zone now. An Availability Zone is represented by a region code followed by a letter identifier; for example, us-east-1a. To ensure that resources are distributed across the Availability Zones for a region, we independently map Availability Zones to identifiers for each account. For example, your Availability Zone us-east-1a might not be the same location as us-east-1a for another account. There's no way for you to coordinate Availability Zones between accounts. 

Availability Zones grow over time, our ability to expand them can become constrained. If this happens, we might restrict you from launching an instance in a constrained Availability Zone unless you already have an instance in that Availability Zone. 

Eventually, we might also remove the constrained Availability Zone from the list of Availability Zones for new customers. Therefore, your account might have a different number of available Availability Zones in a region than another account. 

Before you check the zone, First you need to login to the AWS account 

Command line for checking Availability Zone and Region

aws ec2 describe-regions
aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --region region-name 
PS C:\> Get-EC2Region 
PS C:\> Get-EC2AvailabilityZone -Region region-name