Infrastructure Availability

First, AWS has the concept of Regions, which are physical locations around the world where AWS clusters data centers. Each group of logical data centers is called an Availability Zone (AZ).

Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate AZs within a geographic area. Each AZ has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency network. All traffic between AZs is encrypted. AZ’s make partitioning applications for high availability easy.

If an application such as Netcracker active resource inventory on AWS is portioned across AZs, companies are better isolated and protected from issues such as power outages, lightning strikes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and mode. Each AZ is physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other.