Fun fact, on certain (major) cloud providers, in certain regions, AZs are sometimes different floors of the same building :)

I like how clear Azure is on this:

> Availability zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region. Each zone is made up of one or more datacenters with independent power, cooling, and networking. The physical separation of availability zones within a region limits the impact to applications and data from zone failures, such as power and cooling failures, large-scale flooding, major storms and superstorms, and other events that could disrupt site access, safe passage, extended utilities uptime, and the availability of resources.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/high-av...

I think they expanded Tokyo but previously that was a single-building "region"

And it's virtually impossible to make, say, a Singapore region resilient to natural disasters

Did they claim Tokyo was more than one availability zone? If the 'tokyo' region was only ever claimed to be '1 availability zone' I think being in a single building technically still satisfies my quote above.

But yes, agreed.

Yes, in the API you got multiple AZs.

You may be obligated not to name them, but I'm not: Google.

AZ is a term used by AWS and Azure. GCP documentation makes it clear to "Distribute your resources across multiple zones and regions", where regions are physically different data centers.

That actually wasn't the one I was thinking of!

The latency is exceptional.