An AWS Availability Zone is a physical location where an Amazon data center is located. On the other hand, an AWS Region is a collection or group of Availability Zones or Data Centers.
This setup helps your services to be more available as you can place your VMs in different data centers within an AWS Region. If one of the data centers fails in a Region, the client requests still get served from the other data centers located in the same Region. This arrangement, thus, helps your service to be available even if a Data Center goes down