Where AWS runs and what it runs, in twelve slides — the 39 Regions on a world map, a Region and its code, a real Availability Zone from the air, why AZs are kept apart, an application in two AZs, AZ names and IDs, the services and what each one does, the shared responsibility model, global, regional and zonal services, edge locations, and Local Zones.
The slides
The tool is twelve slides, one picture each:
- Regions around the world: every Region on the map, coloured by partition.
- One Region: Israel (Tel Aviv): its AZs, its code, opt-in Regions, choosing a Region.
- A real Availability Zone, from the air: part of an AZ of
us-west-2. - The distance between Availability Zones: what it protects against, and its limit.
- An application in two Availability Zones: one AZ down, the other serving.
- AZ names and AZ IDs: why
us-east-1a may differ between accounts. - AWS services and what each one does: twelve services, IAM among them.
- Service categories: the 23 categories of the console's Services menu, such as Compute: EC2 and Lambda (read from the console on 2026-11-12).
- The shared responsibility model: what AWS runs and what we run, for EC2, RDS and Lambda.
- Global, regional and zonal services: where a service's resources live.
- Edge locations: the cities where CloudFront, Route 53 and Global Accelerator answer.
- Local Zones: small parts of a Region in faraway cities.
The buttons on the left and right edges move between slides. So do the arrow keys and a swipe.
The dots at the bottom jump to a slide. On the maps, pointing at a dot names it.
The numbers and where they come from
We read every number on the slides from AWS's own pages on 2026-11-12.
AWS adds Regions and zones often, so the numbers change.
Credits