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AWS Solutions Architect (SAA-C03)
Read an SAA-C03 scenario and name the service and architecture that survives the stated failure within the stated budget, typed from memory rather than picked from four options. For engineers who already run AWS but have never defended an architecture on paper; account experience assumed, exam vocabulary taught. 132 cards follow the four published exam domains at their published weight, each card a scenario with one detail hidden.
Your app must survive a datacentre fire without leaving the Region. Which AWS boundary do you spread it across?
Availability Zones — two or more
Source
A Region is a geographic area; an Availability Zone is one or more discrete datacentres inside it, with its own power and cooling, tens of kilometres from its neighbours and joined to them by low-latency private fibre. Spreading across AZs survives a datacentre failure; spreading across Regions survives a regional one, and costs you latency and data-transfer charges. Almost every 'highly available' answer on the exam means Multi-AZ, not multi-Region. Commonly confused with an edge location, which is neither: those are CloudFront's caching points of presence, where the only code of yours that runs is a CloudFront Function or Lambda@Edge.