Cloud provider regions are geographic locations where a cloud provider has physical data centers. For example, AWS has four regions in the US: us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-1 and and us-west2. Each region is fully independent of the others, and data stored in one region is not automatically replicated to another. This means that if a region experiences an outage, only applications or data stored in that region will be affected. Regions are subdivided into availability zones.