An AWS Availability Zone (AZ) is essentially a data center or a cluster of data centers within an AWS region. Each availability zone is isolated from the others to ensure fault tolerance and stability.
AWS designs its infrastructure to have multiple availability zones within each region, typically located miles apart from each other and housed in separate facilities. This geographic separation reduces the risk of a single event, such as a power outage or a natural disaster, impacting multiple availability zones simultaneously.
By deploying resources across multiple availability zones, customers can achieve high availability and fault tolerance for their applications and services. AWS services are designed to automatically distribute traffic and resources across availability zones within a region, providing redundancy and ensuring continuity even in the event of failures or disruptions in one availability zone.
In essence, availability zones are a fundamental building block of the AWS infrastructure, enabling customers to design and deploy resilient and highly available architectures in the cloud.
