AWS Regions and Availability Zones

To understand the architecture of Amazon DocumentDB and how it helps you design highly available applications on AWS, you must be familiar with AWS global infrastructure.

The AWS Global Infrastructure comprises AWS Regions and Availability Zones. AWS Regions are separate geographic areas. AWS Regions consist of multiple, physically separated and isolated Availability Zones that are connected with low latency, high throughput, highly redundant networking. Availability Zones consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, and housed in separate facilities.

AWS Regions and Availability Zones

These Availability Zones enable you to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than possible when using a single data center. You can deploy your applications and databases across multiple Availability Zones. In the unlikely event of a failure of one Availability Zone, user requests are routed to your application instances in the second Availability Zone. This approach ensures that your application continues to remain available at all times.