Regions

A region is the physical location of an IDC. In Tencent Cloud, regions are fully isolated from each other, ensuring cross-region stability and fault tolerance. When purchasing Tencent Cloud services, we recommend selecting the region closest to your end users to minimize access latency and improve download speed.
Regions have the following characteristics:

• The networks of different regions are fully isolated. Tencent Cloud services in different regions cannot communicate via a private network by default.
• Tencent Cloud services across regions can communicate with each other through public IPs over the Internet, while those in a VPC can use peering connection to communicate with each other via Tencent Cloud’s high-speed network, which is faster and more stable.
• Cloud Load Balancer currently supports intra-region traffic forwarding by default. If you enable the cross-region binding feature, a CLB instance can be bound to CVM instances in another region.

Availability Zones

An availability zone (AZ) is a physical IDC of Tencent Cloud with independent power supply and network in the same region. It can ensure business stability, as failures (except for major disasters or power failures) in one AZ are isolated without affecting other AZs in the same region. By starting an instance in an independent availability zone, users can protect their applications from being affected by a single point of failure.
Availability zones have the following characteristics:

• Tencent Cloud services under the same account in the same VPC are interconnected through the private network, meaning they can communicate using private IPs, even if they are in different availability zones of the same region.
• Resources under different Tencent Cloud accounts are availability zone-specific, meaning they cannot communicate via a private network, even if they are in the same region.

China

Other Countries and Regions

How to Select Regions and Availability Zones

When selecting a region and availability zone, take the following into consideration:

• A cloud disk can only be attached to a CVM in the same availability zone.
• The region of the CVM on which the cloud disk will be used, your location, and the location of your users. We recommend that you choose the region closest to your end users when purchasing Tencent Cloud services to minimize access latency and improve access speed.
• The relationship between the CVM on which the cloud disk will be used and other Tencent Cloud services. When you select other Tencent Cloud services, we recommend you try to locate them all in the same availability zone of a single region to allow them to communicate with each other through the private network, reducing access latency and increasing access speed.
• High availability and disaster recovery. Even if you have just one VPC, we still recommend that you deploy your businesses in different availability zones to prevent a single point of failure and enable cross-AZ disaster recovery.
• There may be network latency among different availability zones. We recommend that you assess your business requirements and find the optimal balance between high availability and low latency.

Relevant Operations

Actions such as the use and viewing of cloud disks are region-specific. To easily migrate data and services to other regions or construct a cross-region disaster recovery system, you can copy snapshots to other regions. For more information, see Cross-region Snapshot Replicating.