Availability Zones & Regions
Amazon EC2 provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Availability Zones and Regions.
- Regions are dispersed and located in separate geographic areas (US, EU, etc.).
- Availability Zones are distinct locations within a Region that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region.
Benefits of launching instances in separate Regions include:
- physical proximity of the application to specific customers, improving data transfer speeds
- may meet legal or other business requirements
- With the appropriate settings, it protects the application/s from the failure of a single location.
The following graphic shows a representation of Amazon EC2. Each Region is completely independent. Each Availability Zone is isolated, but connected through low-latency links. 
There may be some minor cost differences depending on the availability zone chosen.
Another factor to be used in choosing an availability zone is geographic proximity to where applications and users will be located. It's typically a good idea to minimize the network latency between the web server / applications and users, which is likely a deciding factor for which region to use.
Before beginning the configuration of SoftNAS on Amazon EC2, select the nearest location/region for Amazon Machine Image of SoftNAS on the Buurst site.
Note : SoftNAS® is already installed as Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which means there's nothing to download. Simply choose an AMI and and subsequent AWS region.
Take note of the region chosen. All AMIs created with this account will be launched in that region.