What Is Amazon AWS Availability Zones (AKA AZ’S)?

If you are planning to move Amazon AWS cloud you should know some of the basic concepts such as Regions, Service Available, Security, Public IPs and Elastic IPs etc. There are also a most important and basic concept called Availability Zones aka AZ.

In this article I will describe about Amazon AWS Availability Zones also called AKA AZ’S.

What Is Amazon AWS Availability Zone?

In simple AWS availability zone is an isolated location inside a region and each region is made up by several availability zones and each availability zones belongs to a single region and also each AZ (Availability Zones) is isolated, but the AZs in a region are connected through low latency links.

In above image we have 3 different scopes:

1. Whole AWS
2. Regions and
3. AZ (Availability Zones)

So, according to AWS service such as EC2, each resource can belong to one of them. For example Instances belongs to AZ’s, AMIs are regional and IAM is global and so on.

With learning about AWS availability zones we should know about infrastructure failures. Many times in a datacenter  disk failure, network failures, power failures etc happens. In this cases their remedies is available.

Disk Failure    : Solution is Implement Raid or Backups.
Network Failure : Solution is Networking Bonding and load balancing.
Power Failure   : Solution is Setup Generators, Online UPS backup.

Before 9/11 twin tower attacks above mentions failures are taken with the mention solutions. But after 9/11 twin tower attacks Server Admins faced strange issue some organizations kept their data in twin towers with the mention remedies but the issue was both building were destroyed and there was no any data recovery mechanism in place. That’s why Admins started thinking of cross site deployment if same applications in different locations.

Disk Failure         : Solution is Implement Raid or Backups.
Network Failure      : Solution is Networking Bonding and load balancing.
Power Failure        : Solution is Setup Generators, Online UPS backup.
Data Center Location : Solution is deploy same apps in different locations in High availability mode

After 9/11 attacks Admins get new idea to deploy applications in two ore more locations for service high availability. Amazon achieved this by using AZ by deploying your applications in different AZ’s in a given region.

Why Require AWS Availability Zones?

Amazon provides high availability to most of its services such as two power supply for all servers, two network sources etc.. So deploying your application on VM which are located in different availability zone instead of one AZ.

Availability Zones Advantages

Main advantage of AZ is data security for location based disasters. So during launching EC2 instance make sure place your EC2 instance with HA in different AZ’s in given region.

Thanks:)