Regions and zones
This topic describes the Alibaba Cloud regions and zones that support Elastic Accelerated Computing Instances (EAIS).
Each region is completely independent. Each zone is isolated, but zones within the same region are connected through low-latency links.
The following figure shows the relationship between regions and zones.
Regions
A region is a physical data center. After you create a resource, you cannot change its region. The following table lists the regions, cities, and Region IDs that support EAIS.
Region | City | Region ID | Number of zones |
|---|---|---|---|
China North 2 | Beijing | cn-beijing | 8 |
China East 1 | Hangzhou | cn-hangzhou | 8 |
China East 2 | Shanghai | cn-shanghai | 7 |
China South 1 | Shenzhen | cn-shenzhen | 5 |
China Southwest 1 | Chengdu | cn-chengdu | 2 |
When you select a region, consider the following factors:
Geographic location
In most cases, select a data center that is closest to your target users to reduce network latency. However, Alibaba Cloud regions in the Chinese mainland offer similar infrastructure, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) network quality, service quality, and Elastic Compute Service (ECS) operations and configurations. BGP networks ensure fast access across all regions in the Chinese mainland.
Relationships between Alibaba Cloud products
If you use multiple Alibaba Cloud products together, keep the following in mind:
Resources in different regions cannot communicate with each other over an internal network. This applies to products such as ECS, ApsaraDB RDS (RDS), and Object Storage Service (OSS).
You cannot deploy ECS instances from different regions behind the same Server Load Balancer (SLB) instance.
Resource pricing
The prices of resources may vary by region. For more information, see the EAIS product page.
Zones
A zone, also known as an availability zone (AZ), is an isolated physical location within a region that has its own independent power and network. Instances in the same zone have lower network latency.
If your application requires high availability, deploy your instances across different zones in the same region.
If your application requires low network latency between instances, create your instances in the same zone.