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2. What are AWS Availability Zones and How Many are There?

Last updated on September 25, 2022 @ 5:45 pm

AWS Availability Zones are a feature of the AWS Cloud that allow you to isolate your applications and data from potential outages in other Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone is divided into several data centers and each data center is divided into several Availability Zones. There are currently four Availability Zones in the US-East-1 region and three Availability Zones in the US-West-2 region. You can create up to 25 Availability Zones.

PRO TIP: AWS Availability Zones are distinct physical locations within an AWS Region. Each Availability Zone is engineered to be isolated from the other Availability Zones in the same Region, and to provide low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region.

As of today, there are 12 AWS Regions and 44 Availability Zones.

Each Availability Zone has its own set of IP addresses, and you can use Amazon EC2 instances in an Availability Zone. You can also use EC2 instances in other Availability Zones, but the instances might not be able to communicate with instances in other Availability Zones. You can use the Amazon S3 service in an Availability Zone. You can’t use the Amazon EC2 Key Management Service in an Availability Zone.

Dale Leydon

Dale Leydon

Sysadmin turned Javascript developer. Owner of 20+ apps graveyard, and a couple of successful ones.