Choose Region

Four factors:

  • Data sovereignty
  • Latency
  • New service/feature
  • cost

    How many AZs

    Best practice: start with two AZ, so that if resources in one AZ are unreachable, your application won’t fail.
    For heavy usage (Amazon DynamoDB) it may be beneficial to use more than two AZs.

Applications that heavily use Amazon EC2 spot instances

Two or more AZs to access more price options

Application with MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle data sources

Two availability zones for active/passive

Data sources Cassandra or MongoDB

2 or more for extremely high availability

VPC

Using One VPC

  • High-performance computing: lower latency
  • Microsoft Active Directory for identity management: better security
  • Small, single applications

For most user cases, there are two primary patterns:

Multi-VPC

easier to maintain, suited for single team/organisations; sometimes required for governance or compliance

Multi-Account

Managing access and standards can be challenging in more complex organisations.

  • Larger organisation
  • multiple IT teams
  • medium-sized organisation anticipating fast growth.

AWS Organisation

Hierarchical grouping of accounts
Organisation permissions overrule account permissions.