IBM Cloud delivers a consistent, full, and resilient stack of cloud services, globally
Over the last nine months, IBM has launched availability zones around the globe. IBM Cloud regions with availability zones are located in the United States (Dallas and Washington, DC), Germany, UK, Japan, and Australia.
Customers using the IBM Cloud may be already familiar with the concepts of availability zones and regions, but for those who aren’t, here are some simple definitions:
IBM Cloud Region: A region is a geographically and physically separate group of one or more availability zones with independent electrical and network infrastructures isolated from other regions. Regions are designed to remove shared single points of failure with other regions and guarantee low inter-zone latency within the region.
IBM Cloud Availability Zone: An availability zone is a logically and physically isolated location within an IBM Cloud region with independent power, cooling, and network infrastructures. It is isolated from other zones to strengthen fault tolerance by avoiding single points of failure between zones while also guaranteeing high bandwidth and low inter-zone latency within a region.
Uniformity and consistency of cloud services between locations
Improved resiliency and availability of the cloud platform and infrastructure
What services can you expect in IBM Cloud regions?
Available cloud services include popular IBM Watson AI, databases, developer tools, platform, and infrastructure services.
Figure 1: IBM Cloud region with consistent full-service stack across three availability zones.
The following integrated services are available in all IBM Cloud regions with availability zones. Use this menu to assemble the stack that best suits your application or workload, confident these services are available wherever you need them.
Artificial Intelligence services
IBM Watson®Discovery enables smart document understanding (SDU) and natural language processing (NLP).
IBM Watson Assistant is an AI-powered chatbot that comes pre-trained with industry-relevant content.
IBM Watson Personality Insights analyzes transaction data and social media to identify psychological traits which predict purchase decisions, intent, and behavioral traits.
IBM Watson Tone Analyzer uses linguistic analysis to detect emotional and language tones in written text.
IBM Watson Knowledge Studio enables subject matter experts to teach Watson the language of an industry or organization without coding or requiring AI skills.
IBM Watson Text to Speech and Speech to Text services convert written text into natural-sounding audio and provide an API to add speech transcription capabilities to applications.
IBM Cloud Databases provides native IBM Cloud services for open source databases, including MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Redis.
DevOps services
IBM Cloud Activity Tracker (Global) enables customers to easily view, manage, and audit IBM Cloud activity to comply with corporate policies and industry regulations.
IBM Event Streams is an event-streaming platform based on Apache Kafka.
IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA (Global) with LogDNA enables customers to quickly find the source of issues and gain deeper insight into application and cloud environment data.
IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud provides life-cycle management for encryption keys used in IBM Cloud services and customer applications.
IBM Cloud Internet Services (Global) provides all-in-one network management services, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, web application firewall (WAF), and global load balancing.
IBM Cloud Service Endpoint provides secure access between IBM Cloud environments and customer-owned facilities.
IBM Cloud Object Storage provides resilient, flexible, low-cost object storage for IBM Cloud applications.
Note: Global services are not necessarily hosted in all regions but are available from all regions.