Regions and availability zones

Basic concepts

Regions and availability zones are the physical locations where the resources provided by Kingsoft Cloud are distributed. The following diagram illustrates their relationship.

Region

Regions refer to different geographical areas where Kingsoft Cloud's physical data centers are located. Different regions are completely isolated from one another to ensure the stability and fault tolerance of the services provided.

Depending on the services provided, regions are divided into two types. One is the regions where data centers providing public services are located such as CN North 1(Beijing) and CN East 1(Shanghai), and the other is the regions where data centers providing specific and dedicated services are located such as CN North Finance 1(Beijing) and CN East Finance 1(Shanghai).

Geographically relevant characteristics are manifested in that:

• By default, cloud products in different regions cannot communicate with each other through the internal network.
• Cloud products in different regions can access the Internet by using elastic IP addresses (EIPs).
• Cloud products in different Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) can communicate with each other in the same region or across different regions through the Peering service provided by Kingsoft Cloud. The service provides more stable and faster access than Internet access.
• The Server Load Balancing (SLB) service can only be used with cloud products, such as Elastic Physical Compute (EPC) and Kingsoft Cloud Elastic Compute (KEC), in the same region.

Availability zone

Availability zones refer to physical data centers located in the same region, with their electrical and network infrastructure isolated from each other. These data centers are often scattered by more than tens of kilometers away from one another.

Availability zones do not correspond one-to-one with physical data centers. The same availability zone in the same region may be located in different physical data centers.

Due to physical isolation, availability zones are completely independent from one another. However, cloud resources under the same account of a user can communicate with each other across availability zones through private IP addresses. This access method is characterized by low latency and high availability.

List of regions and availability zones

The following table lists all regions and availability zones supported by Kingsoft Cloud.

How to choose your region and availability zone

You need to consider the following factors when choosing your region and availability zone:

• Geographical location of target users: Select the region that is closest to the target users to be serviced, which prevents access latency.

• Disaster recovery deployment: If the KEC instances you purchase are located in the same region, it is recommended that you distribute your services in multiple availability zones to ensure fault isolation and cross-zone disaster recovery.

• Interconnection of multiple services: If you select multiple cloud products in the same region, you must consider the latency that may occur in network communication between different availability zones. You can use the same availability zone to take full advantage of the low latency of internal network communication. The best balance must be sought between disaster recovery deployment and low latency based on service needs.

• Access to servers outside China: If servers outside China need to be accessed, you need to choose a region close to the corresponding country or region.