According to Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist, AWS, there is a difference between Regions and Availability Zones. Each Region is a physical location where there are more Availability Zones or AZs. Each Availability Zone, in turn, consists of one or more data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, all housed in separate facilities. With more AZ’s in each Region gives user the ability to run application that are more highly available, error free and durable as compared to a single AZ.
Therefore, AWS has two Regions, US East (Ohio) and US East (Northern Virginia) as both are close enough to serve the same user base. The users can make optimum utilization of AWS features that includes S3 Cross-Region Replication, Cross-Region Read Replicas for Amazon Aurora, Cross-Region Read Replicas for MySQL, and Cross-Region Read Replicas for PostgreSQL. Data transfer between the two Regions is priced at the Inter-AZ price ($0.01 per GB), making cross-region use cases economical.
Peter DeSantis, Vice President, Infrastructure, AWS stated, “Our customers tell us that by running their applications in the AWS Cloud, they are able to move faster, operate more securely, and save substantial costs–all while leveraging the scale and performance of AWS.”
“Now with five highly scalable regions across the United States, AWS customers have multiple options for providing US-based end users low-latency access to cloud applications, as well as the opportunity to architect a variety of inter-region backup and disaster recovery operations for even greater availability.”
The company claims that the new Ohio Region supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and related services including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, NAT Gateway, Spot Instances, and Dedicated Hosts.
