AWS: Regions and Endpoints

To reduce data latency in your applications, most Amazon Web Services offer a regional endpoint to make your requests. An endpoint is a URL that is the entry point for a web service. For example, https://dynamodb.us-west-2.amazonaws.com is an entry point for the Amazon DynamoDB service.

Some services, such as IAM, do not support regions; therefore, their endpoints do not include a region. Some services, such as Amazon EC2, let you specify an endpoint that does not include a specific region, for example, https://ec2.amazonaws.com. In that case, AWS routes the endpoint to us-east-1.

If a service supports regions, the resources in each region are independent. For example, if you create an Amazon EC2 instance or an Amazon SQS queue in one region, the instance or queue is independent from instances or queues in another region.

For information about which regions are supported for each service, please go to here.