How to choose an AWS Region?

With AWS CloudFormation, you can treat your infrastructure as code. This means that you can build an environment by writing lines of code instead of using the AWS Management Console to individually provision resources.

AWS CloudFormation provisions your resources in a safe, repeatable manner, enabling you to frequently build your infrastructure and applications without having to perform manual actions. It determines the right operations to perform when managing your stack and rolls back changes automatically if it detects errors.

• Compliance with data governance and legal requirements: data never leaves a region without your explicit permission

• Proximity to customers: reduced latency

• Available services within a Region: new services and new features aren’t available in every Region

• Pricing: pricing varies region to region and is transparent in the service pricing page

AWS Availability Zones

• Each region has many availability zones (usually 3, min is 2, max is 6). Example:

• ap-southeast-2a

• ap-southeast-2b

• ap-southeast-2c

• Each availability zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity

• They’re separate from each other, so that they’re isolated from disasters

• They’re connected with high bandwidth, ultra-low latency networking

• AWS has Global Services:

• Identity and Access Management (IAM)

• Route 53 (DNS service)

• CloudFront (Content Delivery Network)

• WAF (Web Application Firewall)

• Most AWS services are Region-scoped:

• Amazon EC2 (Infrastructure as a Service)

• Elastic Beanstalk (Platform as a Service)

• Lambda (Function as a Service)

• Rekognition (Software as a Service)

• Region Table: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services