Location

Elastic Compute resources are hosted in multiple locations worldwide. These locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. For example, the asia-southeast-1 (Hong Kong) region denotes a region on the south east of Asia that has following zone: asia-southeast-1a.

Regions

A Regions is a collection of Availability Zones. Elastic Compute instances can migrate across availability zones in the same region. You're recommended to deploy applications across multiple availability zones and multiple regions for redundancy.

Availability Zones

An Availability Zone is a designated deployment area within a specific Region. To decrease network latency, you might want to choose a zone that is close to your services.

Regional & Zonal Resources

Resources	Location Level	Note
Instance	Availability Zone	Instances can migrate across availability zones in the same region. The private IP will change and the disk won't carry over.
Disk	Availability Zone	/
Elastic IPv4	Region	All public IPv4 addresses will be elastic IPv4 addresses.
Public IPv6		/
VPC	Global	/
Subnet	Region	/
Security Group	Global VPC	Apply to all instances in the same Global VPC.

Zonal resources, such as instances and disks, are deployed within a specific availability zone. In contrast, regional resources like elastic IPv4 addresses and subnets can be accessed across the entire region. Zonal resources are restricted to their respective zones, whereas regional resources are accessible by any resource within the region, regardless of the zone.

For example, to attach a zonal disk to an instance, both must be in the same zone. Similarly, to assign an elastic IPv4 address to an instance, both must be in the same region.

Available Regions and Availability Zones

Area	Region	Availability Zone
Asia	asia-east-1 (Shanghai)	asia-east-1a
Asia	asia-north-1 (Beijing)	asia-north-1a
Asia	asia-south-1 (Guangzhou)	asia-south-1a
Asia Pacific	asia-southeast-1 (Hong Kong)	asia-southeast-1a
Europe and Middle East	europe-central-1 (Frankfurt)	europe-central-1a