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).

Choosing regions and availability zones

Amazon Cloud computing resources are housed in highly available data center facilities. To provide additional scalability and reliability, these data center facilities are located in different physical locations. These locations are categorized by regions and Availability Zones.

Amazon Regions are large and widely dispersed into separate geographic locations. Availability Zones are distinct locations within an Amazon Region that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones. They provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Amazon Region.

To create or work with a cluster in a specific region, use the corresponding regional service endpoint. For service endpoints, see Supported regions & endpoints.

Regions and Availability Zones

Supported regions & endpoints

Amazon ElastiCache is available in multiple Amazon Regions. This means that you can launch ElastiCache clusters in locations that meet your requirements. For example, you can launch in the Amazon Region closest to your customers, or launch in a particular Amazon Region to meet certain legal requirements.

By default, the Amazon SDKs, Amazon CLI, ElastiCache API, and ElastiCache console reference the US-West (Oregon) region. As ElastiCache expands availability to new regions, new endpoints for these regions are also available to use in your HTTP requests, the Amazon SDKs, Amazon CLI, and the console.

Each Region is designed to be completely isolated from the other Regions. Within each Region are multiple Availability Zones (AZ). By launching your nodes in different AZs you are able to achieve the greatest possible fault tolerance. For more information on Regions and Availability Zones, see Choosing regions and availability zones at the top of this topic.

Some regions support a subset of node types. For a table of supported node types by Amazon Region, see Supported node types by Amazon Region.

For a table of Amazon products and services by region, see Products and Services by Region.

Locating your nodes

Amazon ElastiCache supports locating all of a cluster's nodes in a single or multiple Availability Zones (AZs). Further, if you elect to locate your nodes in multiple AZs (recommended), ElastiCache enables you to either choose the AZ for each node, or allow ElastiCache to choose them for you.

By locating the nodes in different AZs, you eliminate the chance that a failure, such as a power outage, in one AZ will cause your entire system to fail. Testing has demonstrated that there is no significant latency difference between locating all nodes in one AZ or spreading them across multiple AZs.

You can specify an AZ for each node when you create a cluster or by adding nodes when you modify an existing cluster. For more information, see the following: