In order to provide our customers with additional flexibility to architect scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available workloads in AWS GovCloud (US), we have added a third Availability Zone (AZ) to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, Amazon’s isolated cloud region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads that address the most stringent U.S. government security and compliance requirements.

Availability Zones located in AWS Regions (physical locations) consist of one or more discrete data centers, each of which has redundant power, networking and connectivity, and is housed in separate facilities. Each Availability Zone (AZ) has multiple Internet connections and power connections to multiple grids.

Supporting Mission-Critical Workloads in AWS GovCloud (US)

With the addition of the third AZ, vetted U.S. Government customers and organizations in government-regulated industries that meet AWS GovCloud (US) access requirements now have even more flexibility and availability for their sensitive and regulated data and applications.

Customers can add scalable capacity at any time and access durable and cost-effective AWS Cloud services managed by U.S. Citizens while meeting data security and compliance requirements. They can continue to back up, store, and recover IT systems in seconds by supporting popular DR approaches from simple backups to hot standby solutions that fail over at a moment’s notice.

To help cloud architects build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for their applications, we have the Well-Architected framework. You can get started by downloading the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper.

Learn more about AWS GovCloud (US).