What are isolated locations within an AWS region that protect against failures called?

The term "Availability Zones" refers to the isolated locations within an AWS region that are designed to protect against failures. An Availability Zone consists of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. This design aims to minimize the risk of downtime due to failures in a single location, as the different zones in a region are located far enough apart to prevent outages from cascading between them.

AWS regions are collections of Availability Zones, but they are not the isolated locations themselves; rather, they are overarching structures that contain multiple Availability Zones. Cloud Zones and Edge Locations do not represent isolated areas for failure protection; Cloud Zones is not an official AWS term, and Edge Locations serve a different purpose, primarily focused on content delivery and caching through services like Amazon CloudFront.

Therefore, selecting Availability Zones highlights an understanding that these are specifically designed for high availability and fault tolerance within the AWS architecture.