What does a region code like eu-west-1 mean?

AWS region codes follow a continent-direction-number pattern. eu-west-1 means Europe, west area, the first region launched there — physically Ireland. The number reflects launch order within the area, not a ranking.

Which AWS regions require opt-in?

Regions launched after March 2019 — such as Hong Kong, Bahrain, Cape Town, Milan and Jakarta — are disabled by default and must be explicitly enabled in account settings before you can deploy resources there.

Why is us-east-1 special?

us-east-1 (N. Virginia) is the oldest and largest AWS region and the default endpoint for many global services like IAM, Route 53 and CloudFront control planes. Some global API calls only work against us-east-1.

How many availability zones does a region have?

Most AWS regions have three availability zones, though some have two and the largest have up to six. AZs are isolated data centres within a region, letting you build high-availability deployments that survive a single AZ failure.

Are GovCloud and China regions in this list?

This reference focuses on the standard commercial partition (aws). AWS GovCloud (US) and the China regions run in separate partitions (aws-us-gov and aws-cn) with isolated accounts, so they are noted separately rather than mixed in.

AWS Region Codes Reference

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AWS region codes reference

An AWS Region is a physical cluster of data centres in one geographic area, each containing multiple isolated availability zones. Picking the right region affects latency, data-residency compliance and price. This reference maps every commercial AWS region code — like us-east-1 or ap-southeast-2 — to its location, continent, AZ count and whether it needs to be opted in.

How it works

Region codes encode three parts: a geography prefix (us, eu, ap, sa, ca, af, me, il), a sub-area (east, west, central, north, south, southeast, northeast), and a launch-order number. So ap-northeast-1 is Asia-Pacific, north-east area, first region — Tokyo.

Regions launched since 2019 are opt-in: they are disabled on new accounts and must be enabled before use. Older regions are enabled by default. Use the location and AZ count to choose for latency and resilience.

Tips and notes

Default global control-plane endpoints often resolve to us-east-1 — keep it enabled.
Pick the region nearest your users, but verify data-residency rules first (GDPR, etc.).
Opt-in regions need explicit enabling and may not support every service at launch.
AZ count matters for high availability — prefer a region with at least three AZs for production.