Doesn’t directly map to a continent or a country. It’s an area of the world that AWS selected, and inside that region is a full deployment of AWS infrastructure.
For most of AWS services, when you interact with them, you actually interact with the service in a specific region.
- Geographic separation - isolated fault domain.
- Geopolitical separation - different governance.
- Location control - performance.
Region has a region code and a region name. Example:
- Region code:
ap-southeast-2 - Region name: Asia Pacific (Sydney)
Within a region there are multiple availability zones.