Of all the places where Amazon Web Services operates data centers, northern Virginia is one of the most significant, in part because it’s where AWS first set up shop in 2006. For the notoriously economical and utilitarian Amazon, this meant that it could quickly set up shop with minimal overhead in the area, leasing or buying older data centers rather than building new ones from scratch. Unlike Google and Facebook, AWS doesn’t aggressively brand or call attention to their data centers. They absolutely don’t give tours, and their website offers only rough approximations of the locations of their data centers, which are divided into “regions.”Within a region lies at minimum two “availability zones” and within the availability zones there are a handful of data centers.