What was the first AWS region launched?

What was the first AWS region launched? The first AWS region launched was US East (Northern Virginia).

Today identified as US East (N. Virginia), or us-east-1, the region was the starting point for Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure. AWS launched its first major services in 2006, including Amazon S3 in March and Amazon EC2 in August. Northern Virginia became the original home for this infrastructure and remains one of AWS’s largest and most important regions.

The term “region” can cause confusion because AWS’s earliest services did not initially resemble the mature global network customers use today. Each region now consists of multiple isolated Availability Zones, but AWS expanded that structure over time. The original Northern Virginia location predates later regions such as US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore).

Another common mix-up is confusing AWS’s first region with AWS’s origins as a broader set of developer services. Amazon began exposing web-service capabilities earlier, but the modern cloud infrastructure story is anchored by the 2006 launches of S3 and EC2. Northern Virginia was the first regional base for that expansion.