Where is AWS us-east-1?

us-east-1 is AWS's Northern Virginia region in the United States. It is the oldest and largest AWS region and the default for many global services and the AWS console, which is why it appears in so many examples and IAM/global endpoints.

How do region codes differ between providers?

Each cloud names regions its own way. AWS uses area-direction-number like eu-west-2, GCP uses a continent-direction-number like europe-west2, and Azure uses a single descriptive word like uksouth. All three can point to the same city — London in this case — but the codes are not interchangeable.

What is the difference between a region and an availability zone?

A region is a geographic area, usually mapped to a city, containing multiple isolated availability zones (separate data centres with independent power and networking). You deploy across zones within a region for high availability, and across regions for disaster recovery or lower latency to distant users.

How should I choose a region?

Pick the region closest to most of your users to minimise latency, then confirm it offers the services you need and meets any data-residency or compliance requirement (for example keeping EU data in the EU). Cost also varies by region, so compare pricing for your heavy services.

Is this list every region?

No. It covers the most commonly used regions across the three major clouds. Providers add regions regularly, so check the official region tables for the complete and current list, including newer or restricted-access regions.

What is the Cloud Region Reference?

Searchable reference of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure region codes mapped to their cities and geographic areas, so you can match an opaque region identifier to a real-world location. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Cloud Region Reference

Name: Cloud Region Reference
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Decode an opaque cloud region code

Cloud providers identify their data-centre regions with short codes that do not always reveal where they are. This reference maps the most-used AWS, Google Cloud and Azure region codes to their real cities and geographic areas, so you can tell at a glance that eu-west-2, europe-west2 and uksouth all sit in London.

How it works

Each provider follows its own naming scheme:

AWS    eu-west-2          area-direction-number   -> London, UK
GCP    europe-west2       continent-direction-num -> London, UK
Azure  uksouth            descriptive word        -> London, UK

A region groups several availability zones — physically separate data centres with independent power, cooling and networking. You spread workloads across zones within a region for resilience, and across regions for global reach or disaster recovery.

Key regions by provider

AWS

Code	Location
us-east-1	Northern Virginia (oldest, default for many global services)
us-east-2	Ohio
us-west-1	Northern California
us-west-2	Oregon
eu-west-1	Ireland
eu-west-2	London
eu-central-1	Frankfurt
ap-southeast-1	Singapore
ap-northeast-1	Tokyo

us-east-1 is special: it is the default region for AWS global services like IAM, CloudFront, and Route 53, and it tends to get new features first.

Google Cloud (GCP)

Code	Location
us-central1	Iowa
us-east1	South Carolina
europe-west1	Belgium
europe-west2	London
europe-west3	Frankfurt
asia-east1	Taiwan
asia-southeast1	Singapore

Azure

Code	Location
eastus	Virginia
westus	California
westeurope	Netherlands
northeurope	Ireland
uksouth	London
ukwest	Cardiff
eastasia	Hong Kong
southeastasia	Singapore

Choosing a region: the key questions

Where are your users? Latency to end-users is typically the dominant factor. A user in London making API requests to a Virginia region adds roughly 80–100 ms of round-trip time versus a London region.

Does a required service exist in that region? Newer and more specialised services sometimes roll out to major US regions first. Check the provider’s service availability matrix before committing to a region for a new project.

What are the data-residency requirements? GDPR requires personal data about EU citizens to be stored within the EU or in countries with adequate protection. UK GDPR has similar requirements. The region code tells you exactly which country the data physically lives in.

What does it cost? Compute and egress prices vary meaningfully between regions — sometimes 10–20% for the same instance type. If you are running significant workloads, compare pricing for your key services before choosing between equivalent regions.