An Availability Zone consists of a single data center or a cluster of data centers within a region, strategically positioned several miles apart to minimize the risk of simultaneous failures due to regional disasters.
This setup ensures that while they are sufficiently distanced to enhance resilience, they remain close enough to maintain low latency.
The illustration depicts the functioning of Availability Zones within three regions (represented by orange circles): Northern California, Oregon, and GovCloud (US-West).
Surrounding these regions are grids of Availability Zones, indicated by blue circles. The focus zooms in on the Northern California region, which comprises three groupings of data centers: US-West-1A, US-West-1B, and US-West-1C.
The configuration of Availability Zones enhances the resilience of cloud services.