If your customers or staff are in India, the first decision you make on AWS is where your systems live. AWS has two full regions in the country, plus two smaller Local Zones. Picking well affects speed, cost, which services you can use, and how easy your next audit is.

The two regions at a glance

Each Availability Zone is one or more separate data centres with its own power and networking. Running across two or three zones in one region protects you from a single data-centre failure. Running across two regions protects you from a whole region going down.

Start with Mumbai, usually

Mumbai is the default for good reasons:

• More services. If you need a particular database engine, AI service or server type, it is more likely to be in Mumbai. Check the AWS “Regional services” list for anything you can’t do without.
• More server types. More choice makes right-sizing easier and gives you more room to use cheaper options.
• Most partners and tools assume it. Marketplace products, managed tools and reference designs for India are usually built and tested in Mumbai first.

When Hyderabad makes sense

• As your recovery region. Mumbai and Hyderabad are roughly 600 km apart. Keeping backups and a standby copy in Hyderabad means a regional problem in Mumbai doesn’t take you down, and your data never leaves India.
• For a second live site. Some lenders and payment companies run live in both regions so they can switch with almost no downtime.
• When everything you need is there. If the services you use are all available in Hyderabad, it can be a sensible main region. Compare prices for your exact setup in the AWS Pricing Calculator; prices can differ between regions.

What about Delhi and Kolkata?

AWS also has Local Zones in Delhi and Kolkata. A Local Zone is a small extension of a region, closer to a particular city, offering a limited set of services such as compute and storage. Both are linked to the Mumbai region.

They help when a few milliseconds matter for users in the north or east: online gaming, live video, trading screens or real-time apps. For a normal website, ERP or business app, Mumbai alone is fast enough for the whole country.

The pattern we set up most often

1. Mumbai as the main region, with production spread across at least two Availability Zones.
2. Backups copied to Hyderabad automatically, using AWS Backup with cross-region copies.
3. A standby in Hyderabad sized to your recovery target. That can be just backups (slowest, cheapest), a small “pilot light” copy, or a full second site (fastest, costs the most).
4. A restore test on a schedule, so the recovery plan is proven and not assumed.

How fast do you need to recover?

Before choosing how much to run in the second region, agree two numbers with the business:

• How long can you be down? If the answer is a day, nightly backups in Hyderabad may be enough. If it is under an hour, you need a standby copy that is already running.
• How much recent data can you lose? If losing the last day of work is acceptable, daily backup copies work. If you can’t lose more than a few minutes, the database needs to copy changes to Hyderabad continuously.

The tighter both numbers are, the more the second region costs. Most businesses land somewhere in the middle, and it is fine to start with backups and add a standby later.

Can you change regions later?

Yes, but it is a migration, not a setting. Servers, databases and storage have to be copied across, addresses change, and everything needs testing again. It is much cheaper to choose well at the start, and to build with infrastructure as code (for example AWS CloudFormation or Terraform) so a second copy of your setup can be created in another region in hours rather than weeks.

Costs to plan for when you use both

• Data transfer between regions is charged. Replicating a busy database to Hyderabad has a monthly cost; estimate it before you switch it on.
• Standby servers cost money even when idle. Match the standby to how fast you really need to recover.
• Backup storage in the second region grows over time. Set retention rules so old copies expire.

A quick way to decide

• Most users in India and need the widest choice of services? Mumbai.
• Regulated (BFSI, payments, healthcare) or can’t afford a long outage? Mumbai plus Hyderabad for recovery.
• Need very low latency in Delhi NCR or eastern India? Mumbai plus a Local Zone for the parts that need it.
• Everything you use is in Hyderabad and the price is right for you? Hyderabad can be your main region, with Mumbai for recovery.

Where DevOps TechLab fits

We set up AWS for Indian companies with the region plan decided up front: which systems run where, how backups reach the second region, and how quickly you can recover. If you are already on AWS and everything sits in one zone, we can tell you what it would take to add a recovery region and what it would cost each month.