
Why Amazon's Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country - potshot
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-web-services-data-center/423147?single_page=true
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yeukhon
"Unlike Google and Facebook, AWS doesn’t aggressively brand or call attention
to their data centers. They absolutely don’t give tours, and their website
offers only rough approximations of the locations of their data centers, which
are divided into “regions.” Within a region lies at minimum two “availability
zones” and within the availability zones there are a handful of data centers."

I want to point out one very important fact. AZ is logical. A typical AWS
account would get, IRRC, up to 4 AZs. However, not all accounts is provisioned
with the same set of AZs.

Account A: a, b, c, e Account B: a, c, d, e Account C: a, c, d, e

By logical, even though all three accounts have AZ "a", that "a" is not
necessarily from the same data center (remember multiple DCs per region). It
can be "a" in one of their us-east-1 DC#2, or DC#3. Though when m3.medium runs
out in us-east-1 AZ "a", you will get full unavailability in all accounts
running "a".

