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Understanding how Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure is organised helps you design applications that are fast, resilient, and compliant. This lesson covers regions, availability zones, and the network backbone that connects them.
A region is a geographic area where Alibaba Cloud has one or more data centres. Each region is completely independent, meaning data does not automatically replicate between regions.
| Region | Region ID | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| China (Hangzhou) | cn-hangzhou | One of the earliest regions |
| China (Shanghai) | cn-shanghai | Major business hub |
| China (Beijing) | cn-beijing | Government and enterprise workloads |
| China (Shenzhen) | cn-shenzhen | Southern China coverage |
| China (Hong Kong) | cn-hongkong | International traffic, no ICP required |
| Singapore | ap-southeast-1 | Southeast Asia hub |
| Japan (Tokyo) | ap-northeast-1 | East Asia coverage |
| Germany (Frankfurt) | eu-central-1 | European Union coverage |
| UK (London) | eu-west-1 | UK data residency |
| US (Virginia) | us-east-1 | North America coverage |
Alibaba Cloud operates 28+ regions with 80+ availability zones worldwide.
When selecting a region, consider:
An availability zone (AZ) is one or more physically separate data centres within a region. Each AZ has:
AZs within the same region are connected by low-latency, high-bandwidth private fibre links. This allows you to:
Region: cn-hangzhou
├── Zone A (Data Centre 1)
├── Zone B (Data Centre 2)
└── Zone C (Data Centre 3)
↕ Low-latency private links ↕
If Zone A experiences an outage, your application continues running in Zone B and Zone C.
Alibaba Cloud has invested heavily in its global network infrastructure:
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