A zone is an isolated area within a region that contains a cloud datacenter within independently operated zones and is fault-tolerant from other zones. A region is a geographic area within a single government or regulatory environment. CSP manage regions (and therefore zones within regions) independently, in compliance with local regulations.

A region has redundancy if a Cloud Service Provider operates at least two zones in that region and can fail over between zones.

Compute Cost per Core calculates the median cost per core across all compute instance types in a region.

Compute Cost Index normalizes Compute Costs per Core across regions. Scores are normalized to an index starting at one, using the lowest median cost per core as the baseline.

Compute Cost Eight Core is the median regional monthly cost of an eight core compute instance with 28-34 GB of RAM in the general-purpose product family.

Government Options shows each Cloud Service Providers regions available for specific countries’ government use.

Partner Managed identifies regions operated by a third-party or partner to a Cloud Service Provider.

Service Count is a count of each CSPs service coverage within our Liftr Cloud Distiller comparison matrix of high value IaaS and PaaS services offered by each CSP. Our Cloud Distiller currently tracks and normalizes about 200 unique types of IaaS and PaaS services across the four CSPs we track.