AWS Technical Essentials Practice

The primary purpose of AWS Availability Zones is to provide high availability and fault tolerance. Each Availability Zone is essentially a distinct data center within a specific region, designed to be isolated from failures in other zones. By spreading resources across multiple Availability Zones, applications can remain operational even if one zone experiences issues such as power outages, networking problems, or hardware failures. This redundancy helps ensure that applications running in AWS can maintain uptime and fulfill Service Level Agreements (SLAs) related to availability.

While options like replicating data across regions, offering low latency for global applications, and serving as isolated backup systems play roles in AWS's overall architecture, they do not directly address the core function of Availability Zones. The focus of these zones is primarily on maintaining application availability and reliability at a regional level, rather than on cross-region or backup functionalities. Therefore, the emphasis on high availability and fault tolerance highlights the critical role of Availability Zones in AWS's design to support resilient, distributed applications.