Region or Availability Zone?

About this interactive

AWS shows both kinds of separation on its map. Regions: each is a location far from the others, on different continents or in different parts of one. A disaster in one area does not reach another region. Availability zones: within one region, separate buildings with their own infrastructure, located near each other. They guard against losing a building, but not against everything that can hit the area. Links between them are very fast, which makes failover easy and lets two live sites run side by side. The further apart the copies, the more delay, which some applications do not handle well. The lesson's suggestion: two live sites in separate zones, load balanced, plus a hot or warm site in another region.

What you'll learn

Decide whether redundant copies belong in separate cloud regions (far apart, to survive an area-wide disaster) or in separate availability zones of one region (separate buildings close together, for fast failover and low delay)

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

3.4 Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture.

Key terms

Region: A geographic location where a cloud provider's data center infrastructure is hosted, selected when provisioning cloud resources.
Availability Zone: An isolated physical location within a cloud provider's region with its own independent power, cooling, and networking, used to deploy resources in ways that protect applications from single-datacenter failures.
Location Redundancy: The practice of distributing duplicate systems or services across geographically separate sites to protect against localized failures or disasters.
Failover: The automatic switching to a redundant system or component when the primary one fails.

Topics

Interactive Streak Sort

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