Keep serving when one location has trouble — Regions and Availability Zones

Your goal

Place two instance records in subnets from different Availability Zones.

Why this matters

An app can place resources in more than one location within a Region. You will create two instance records in different zones and compare their placement. Placement alone is not an outage-resilience test.

Words you will use

A Region is a geographic AWS area. Availability Zones are separate locations within a Region. Redundancy means having another usable copy when one component fails.

How to proceed

Start a fresh emulator, read each numbered step, and enter the practice settings shown. Run the action, inspect its API receipt, then continue. Finish lab checks the emulator state again before saving your progress.

1. Create subnets in two zones

Create a VPC with one subnet in us-east-1a and another in us-east-1b. A zone is a separate location within a Region. A multi-zone design still needs application and data planning.

2. Place one server in each subnet

Launch one small instance record per subnet and save both IDs. This changes actual placement configuration in the emulator. It does not start physical machines or simulate a data-center failure.

3. Compare the returned placements

Describe both instances and inspect their AvailabilityZone fields. The lab checks that the placements differ. Two placements alone do not prove an application survives a zone outage.

Practice, then check your understanding

Perform the actions yourself and inspect the returned state. Errors keep your settings so you can retry. Starting another lab clears the previous live environment. Earned XP is kept, and signed-in achievements sync to your account. Replay does not award duplicate XP.

Read the official AWS documentation for service behavior and production details.