AWS Regions and Availability Zones: A Useful Guide for Beginners

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completely changed the game for how we build and manage infrastructure. Gone are the days when spinning up a new service meant begging your sys team for hardware, waiting weeks, and spending hours in a cold data center plugging in cables. Now? A few clicks (or API calls), and yes — you've got an entire data center at your fingertips.

But with great power comes great... complexity. AWS hands us a buffet of options, and figuring out how to architect for high availability and disaster recovery can be, frankly, a bit overwhelming. So let's break it down. These are the three infrastructure concepts you actually need to care about when planning for uptime: Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations.

If your go-to plan is just "I'll just pick us-east-1 and be done with it", this post is for ...