​
Overview

Simnet’s geography has two levels. A region is a geographic location. Inside it are one or more availability zones — independent failure domains you can spread across for resilience. Every resource you create belongs to exactly one zone. Nothing is global.

​
Activating a region

Before you can create anything in a region, your account has to be activated there. Activation establishes your identity in that region; it does not build any infrastructure on its own. The console handles this for you the first time you create a resource — you pick a region, it activates, and then it sets up the network. See the Quickstart.
Some accounts are subject to a residency lock, which ties the account to a single activated region. While that lock is on, adding a second region is refused with an explanation rather than failing silently. If you need to operate in more than one region, the lock has to be turned off first.

​
What each zone gets

When Simnet deploys your account into a zone, that zone receives its own:
  • a VPC — an isolated private address space
  • a network inside the VPC, with a gateway and a usable IP range
  • a public IP
  • a VPN gateway, which is what makes cross-zone and cross-region connectivity possible later
Zones do not share a VPC. Deploying into three zones gives you three VPCs. This is the direct reason the deployment screens show a VPC count equal to your selected zone count.
Provisioning a zone takes roughly 30–90 seconds. The console reports it step by step — queued, creating VPC, creating network, acquiring IP, setting up VPN gateway, ready — so a slow zone is visibly progressing rather than stuck.

​
If a zone fails

Zone provisioning can partially fail: some zones come up, others don’t. When that happens the platform tells you which zones failed and why, and offers a Retry on each one. The successful zones stay usable in the meantime — a partial deployment isn’t rolled back.

​
Region context

The console is always scoped to a region context, shown and switched in the top bar. This determines which region’s resources the lists show. Switching context doesn’t move anything; it changes what you’re looking at. If you operate in several regions you can also work in a group context spanning them, which is what makes account-wide views possible.
If a resource you know exists isn’t in a list, check your region context before anything else. A VM in Canada West is genuinely absent from a Canada East list — that’s the model working, not a bug.

​
Choosing zones

For a single deployment you can pick one zone or several:
  • One zone — simplest. Everything is co-located.
  • Several zones — spread across zones for high availability, at the cost of managing more VPCs and paying for traffic between them.
Zones you aren’t permitted to use aren’t offered.

​
Connecting across regions

Resources in different VPCs are isolated by default, including across zones of the same region. Fabric is the surface that connects them, using encrypted VPN tunnels between the VPN gateways each zone was given. Once connected, machines reach each other over private addresses without traversing the public internet.
Fabric connections are currently limited to VPCs in different zones of the same region. Connecting VPCs across two different regions is not yet available, even though the map draws your whole footprint. See Networking.

Networking

VPCs, public IPs, firewall policies, and Fabric in detail.

Quickstart

See region activation and zone setup happen in order.