AWS Global Infrastructure

We all know that AWS is a cloud service working in every part of the world. But do u ever had this question How does amazon provide its services across the world? To get the answer we need to understand AWS Global infrastructure. And In this article, we will try to understand it.

What are AWS Regions?

AWS Regions are separate geographic areas that AWS uses to house its infrastructure. These are distributed around the world so that customers can choose a region closest to them in order to host their cloud infrastructure there. The closer your region is to you, the better so that you can reduce network latency as much as possible for your end-users. You want to be near the data centers for fast service.

AWS maintains multiple geographic Regions, including Regions in North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle East.

As of today, there are 20 public regions: N. Virginia, Ohio, N. California, Oregon, Cape Town, HongKong, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Montreal, Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Bahrain and Sao Paulo. There are also 2 non-public regions in the US (GovCloud US-East and GovCloud US-West), 2 regions in China (Beijing and Ningxia) and 1 region in Japan (Osaka) that require a special application process.

Best practices for choosing AWS Regions

In general, try to follow these best practices when you choose a region, to help ensure top performance and resilience:

• Proximity: Choose a region closest to your location and your customer’s location to optimize network latency.
• Services: Try and think about what are your most needed services. Usually, the newest services start on a few main regions then pop up in other regions later.
• Cost: Certain regions will cost more than others, so use built-in AWS calculators to do rough cost estimates to inform your choices.
• Compliance: You may need to meet regulatory compliance needs such as GDPR by hosting your deployment in a specific — or multiple regions.

What are AWS Availability Zones?

An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. AZs give customers the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center. Each AWS region is isolated and operates independently from other regions but all AZs in an AWS Region are interconnected and all traffic between AZs is encrypted. AZs are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other.

Why AWS Availability Zones?

There are several reasons why there is need to use AZs which comes in handy in several different situations. Just to cite some of the most common use cases, if you distribute your instances across multiple Availability Zones and one instance fails, you can design your application so that an instance in another Availability Zone can handle requests. This is like an emergency load balancer without using an actual load balancer.In general, AWS Availability Zones give you the flexibility to launch production apps and resources that are highly available, resilient/fault-tolerant, and scalable as compared to using a single data center. Having more options and backups is better!

What is Edge Location?

Edge Location refers to servers works as cache for delivery of content which is frequently accessed. It also works as reverse proxy server providing security to main servers. AWS edge locations provide an additional layer of network infrastructure that provides benefits to any web application that uses Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53 service.

CloudFront is the most commonly discussed use of edge locations. It’s a content delivery network that caches content in edge locations. Content can be served directly from the cache, so it gets to users faster. CloudFront is often used to serve static assets, speed up websites, and stream video.

Route 53 is purportedly a managed DNS service with name servers spread across Amazon’s edge locations. DNS responses come directly from the edge locations, so they’re as fast as possible.

Conclusion:
If you want to deploy your application, you need to have a clear understanding of AWS Regions, AWS Availability Zones and Edge Locations. You need to know which of the components of the AWS Global Infrastructure allow you to accomplish your task. Which can help you to build an efficient solution that provides high availability, security, low latency and achieves maximum benefit from it.

“P.S. If you read it till the end, Thank you!…

If you like to read about Cloud Computing then check my previous Article.

This article is part of AWS Career Growth Program (AWS-CGP) by Pravin Mishra

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