Availability Zones
less than a minute
AWS Availability Zones (AZs) are data center locations that are physically separate from each other, yet connected by a low-latency network. Each AZ is designed to be isolated from failures in other AZs, which provides high availability and fault tolerance for your applications and data.
When you launch resources like EC2 instances or RDS databases in an AWS region, you can choose to launch them in a specific AZ. You can also create subnets within your VPC that are associated with specific AZs.
By distributing your resources across multiple AZs, you can achieve higher levels of availability and fault tolerance. For example, you could launch an application in two different AZs and use a load balancer to distribute traffic between them. If one AZ experiences a failure, traffic can be automatically redirected to the other AZ, minimizing downtime and reducing the risk of data loss.
AWS currently offers 77 AZs across 24 geographic regions, as well as additional AWS Local Zones and Wavelength Zones that are designed to support low-latency, high-bandwidth applications. Each AZ is designed to be independent and physically separate from other AZs, with its own power, cooling, and networking infrastructure.