Why one cloud outage takes down half the Internet
Cloud regions: where an app in the cloud really lives
An app "in the cloud" still lives in one place on the map. What an AWS region is, why every app has to pick one, and why so many sit in the oldest, in Northern Virginia.
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The buildings of AWS are not spread at random. They stand in groups, each in one area of the world, such as Northern Virginia, Ireland or Tokyo. AWS calls each group a region.
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Every region has a short code name. When you set up your ticket app, AWS asked you to pick one, and you picked us-east-1, in Northern Virginia.
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From that day on, your app lives there, on computers in the data centres of us-east-1. It is the oldest region of AWS, open since 2006, and a great many apps live there too, or lean on something that does.
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So your whole app lives in one area of the map. A storm, a flood or a fire there could hit everything in it, and your app with it.
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Go further
Two things worth knowing about regions.