Answer : What are typical values for Interzone data transfers in the same region? Although AWS will not guarantee, state, or otherwise commit to hard numbers, typical measurments are sub 10 ms, with numbers around 3 ms is what I have seen. How does latency affect data transfer throughput? The higher the latency the lower the maximum bandwidth. There are a number of factors to consider here. An excellent paper was written by Brad Hedlund. Should I worry about latency in AWS networks between zones in the same region? Unless you are using the latest instances with very high performance network adapters (10 Gb or higher) I would not worry about it. The benefits of fault tolerance should take precendence except for the most specialized cases. For your use case, database transactions, the difference between 1 ms and 10 ms will have minimal impact, if at all, on your transaction performance. However, unless you are using multiple EC2 instances in multiple zones, you want your...