AWS Regions

An AWS region is a geographic area where Amazon Web Services (AWS) operates physical data centers. Each region comprises multiple isolated Availability Zones (AZs), which are clusters of data centers that provide fault tolerance and redundancy.

Regions enable AWS to offer a globally distributed infrastructure, allowing users to deploy applications and store data closer to their end users. This improves performance, reduces latency, and provides disaster recovery capabilities.

By default, if you do not specify an AWS region in your query, the service will search across all regions where the service is available.

For example, the following query:

SELECT * FROM aws.ec2.describe_instances;

Will return EC2 instances from all regions where EC2 is available, limited to the regions active within the AWS profile’s account.

Filtering for Specific Regions

To query data from a single region or a subset of regions, use the _aws_region field in the WHERE clause. For example, the following query retrieves instances only from the us-east-1 or us-east-2 regions:

SELECT * FROM aws.ec2.describe_instances
WHERE _aws_region IN ('us-east-1', 'us-east-2');

Identifying the Region of a Row

For services that operate across regions, an additional column called _aws_region is included in the table schema. This column indicates the specific AWS region from which each row was generated.