Where is AWS us-east-1?

us-east-1 is AWS's Northern Virginia region in the United States. It is the oldest and largest AWS region and the default for many global services and the AWS console, which is why it appears in so many examples and IAM/global endpoints.

How do region codes differ between providers?

Each cloud names regions its own way. AWS uses area-direction-number like eu-west-2, GCP uses a continent-direction-number like europe-west2, and Azure uses a single descriptive word like uksouth. All three can point to the same city — London in this case — but the codes are not interchangeable.

What is the difference between a region and an availability zone?

A region is a geographic area, usually mapped to a city, containing multiple isolated availability zones (separate data centres with independent power and networking). You deploy across zones within a region for high availability, and across regions for disaster recovery or lower latency to distant users.

How should I choose a region?

Pick the region closest to most of your users to minimise latency, then confirm it offers the services you need and meets any data-residency or compliance requirement (for example keeping EU data in the EU). Cost also varies by region, so compare pricing for your heavy services.

Is this list every region?

No. It covers the most commonly used regions across the three major clouds. Providers add regions regularly, so check the official region tables for the complete and current list, including newer or restricted-access regions.

Cloud Region Reference

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Decode an opaque cloud region code

Cloud providers identify their data-centre regions with short codes that do not always reveal where they are. This reference maps the most-used AWS, Google Cloud and Azure region codes to their real cities and geographic areas, so you can tell at a glance that eu-west-2, europe-west2 and uksouth all sit in London.

How it works

Each provider follows its own naming scheme:

AWS    eu-west-2          area-direction-number   -> London, UK
GCP    europe-west2       continent-direction-num -> London, UK
Azure  uksouth            descriptive word        -> London, UK

A region groups several availability zones — physically separate data centres with independent power, cooling and networking. You spread workloads across zones within a region for resilience, and across regions for global reach or disaster recovery.

Tips and notes

Choose the region nearest your users to cut round-trip latency.
Verify the region supports the specific services and instance types you need — newer regions sometimes lag on feature availability.
Respect data-residency rules: keep regulated data in a region within the required jurisdiction.
Prices differ between regions for the same service, so factor cost into the decision for compute- or egress-heavy workloads.