Choosing the AWS region

Not every AWS service that you see in the list is available in every AWS region. AWS is a global cloud infrastructure that is built around the concept of AWS regions. An AWS region is a physical location in the world where you can operate your cloud applications. Depending on the region in which you choose to operate, some services might not be available. For example, when we created our account, the region defaulted to US East (Ohio). At the time of writing, the Ohio region does not have the Amazon Lex service.

If a service is not available in a region, you will see a Region Unsupported message, similar to this:

For this book, we recommend that you change the region to US East (N. Virginia), also known as region us-east-1. This Northern Virginia region has all of the AWS services available, and it is also the region that gets the newest AWS services first.

Select the Northern Virginia region by clicking on the region name next to your AWS account name. It is important for you to do this to ensure that the examples and projects in this book are consistent. The US East (N. Virginia) region is the first choice in the following screenshot: