Where exactly are AWS EC2 Availability Zones?

Question

I am trying to create a server with the least possible delay for my target audience. I get the difference between regions and accessibility zones (I think). Does it look like access zones are in different cities? Where are they? I tried cleaning Google in the last hour and I could not find anything.

Answer 1

The best that Amazon provides in terms of public information is its EC2 FAQ . If you want the smallest possible delay, you can not just ping the servers in each availability zone from your target location and find the lowest delay this way? There is no guarantee that physical proximity == low latency in any case.

Answer 2

It can be assumed that all access zones in one region have a similar delay. (since they are all very close). In addition, as far as I know, there is no need, access zones are the same for all users. (that is, us-east-1a may be a different data center for different users).

Answer 3

You can read this page of the Amazon doc that availability zones do not apply to a specific location:

In order to ensure the distribution of resources by accessibility areas for the region, we independently correlate availability zones with identifiers for each account. For example, your us-east-1a availability zone might not match the us-east-1a location for another account. Please note that you will not be able to coordinate availability zones between accounts.