what is the difference of regions and zones

Regions are completely independent. Zones are completely isolated. However, zones in the same region can be connected with low-latency links.

Region

A region is a geographic area where a data center resides. The region of an Alibaba Cloud resource cannot be changed after the resource is created. The following table describes the information about all regions of Alibaba Cloud, including the region IDs and the cities where the regions reside.

Regions in mainland China

Region oustside mainland China

Zone

A zone is a physical area with independent power grids and networks in a region. The network latency for access between instances within the same zone is shorter.

Zones within the same region have access to each other, but faults within a single zone will not affect the others. We recommend that you choose a deployment method based on your business requirements for disaster recovery and network latency.

• If your application requires high disaster recovery capabilities, we recommend that you choose multi-zone deployment to create your instances in different zones of the same region.
• If your application requires low network latency, we recommend that you choose single-zone deployment to create your RDS instances in the same zone.

Alibaba Cloud Product Regions

Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure is built around regions and zones (availability zones). Region refers to a physical node on a global scale. Each region is composed of multiple zones. A zone is composed of one or multiple scattered data centers, each of which has independent supporting facilities including redundant power supplies, networks, and connections. A zone helps to improve the efficiency of production apps and databases and has higher availability, error tolerance capabilities, and extendibility than a single data center.

Alibaba Cloud's data centers in China share similar attributes in regards to infrastructure, BGP network quality, service quality, ECS operation, and configuration. To ensure optimal coverage, we recommend that you select a data center region closest to your end-users. Please note that access to these regions from Mainland China may experience high latency and are generally not recommended for users inside Mainland China.