Resource locations - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Resource locations

Amazon EC2 resources are specific to the Amazon Region or Availability Zone in which they reside.

Resource Type Description

Amazon EC2 resource identifiers

Regional

Each resource identifier, such as an AMI ID, instance ID, EBS volume ID, or EBS snapshot ID, is tied to its Region and can be used only in the Region where you created the resource.

User-supplied resource names

Regional

Each resource name, such as a security group name or key pair name, is tied to its Region and can be used only in the Region where you created the resource. Although you can create resources with the same name in multiple Regions, they aren't related to each other.

AMIs

Regional

An AMI is tied to the Region where its files are located within Amazon S3. You can copy an AMI from one Region to another. For more information, see Copy an AMI.

EBS snapshots

Regional

An EBS snapshot is tied to its Region and can only be used to create volumes in the same Region. You can copy a snapshot from one Region to another. For more information, see Copy an Amazon EBS snapshot.

EBS volumes

Availability Zone

An Amazon EBS volume is tied to its Availability Zone and can be attached only to instances in the same Availability Zone.

Elastic IP addresses

Regional

An Elastic IP address is tied to a Region and can be associated only with an instance in the same Region.

Instances

Availability Zone

An instance is tied to the Availability Zones in which you launched it. However, its instance ID is tied to the Region.

Key pairs

Global or Regional

The key pairs that you create using Amazon EC2 are tied to the Region where you created them. You can create your own RSA key pair and upload it to the Region in which you want to use it; therefore, you can make your key pair globally available by uploading it to each Region.

For more information, see Amazon EC2 key pairs and Windows instances.

Security groups

Regional

A security group is tied to a Region and can be assigned only to instances in the same Region. You can't enable an instance to communicate with an instance outside its Region using security group rules. Traffic from an instance in another Region is seen as WAN bandwidth.