quickNotes: AWS Region, AZ, Edge locations for a solution architect
Each AWS region is a separate geographic area, completely independent, isolated from the other regions & helps achieve the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability
- Communication between AWS regions is across the public Internet
- To achieve five 9’ availability & DR recoverability, AWS services are deployed across regions.
Each region has multiple Availability Zones (AZ)
- Each AZ is physically isolated, geographically separated from each other and designed as an independent failure zone
- AZs are connected with low-latency private links (not public internet)
- For fault tolerance & avoiding single point of failure, AWS services are deployed across AZs.
AWS services offered in a region or AZ differ slightly, esp newer released ones, see list of eligible services given a region.
Provisioning of AWS services are done at AZ level (for few like EC2), Region level (for most) and Global level. Based on your co-location use cases and user access patterns, provisioning a multi-region connectivity and extending AWS services across region are done.
Refer to Creating a Multi-Region Application with AWS Services – Part 1, Compute, Networking, and Security. Part 2 & 3 and DR can be reached from the above link, for further considerations on your solution design. I had reCap:notes on the same from my other Blog.
Also calculating availability and achieving HA at concept level and few best practices of how to design highly available and scalable AWS services, would be helpful.
Apart from AWS Regions and AZs, AWS deliver data processing, analytics, and storage close to your connectivity endpoints, called Edge services, allowing you to deploy APIs and tools to locations outside AWS regions.
Edge locations are maintained by AWS through a worldwide network of data centers for the distribution of content and to reduce latency. Refer to AWS CloudFront for key features of Edge network.
My reCap:notes on AWS global network throw further light on edge connectivity.
Local Zones are an extension of an AWS Region that provide you the ability to place resources in multiple locations closer to your end users.
Wavelength zone, deploys standard AWS compute and storage services to the edge of telecommunication carriers’ 5G networks.
AWS Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility.
Except that it’s not possible to deploy an S3 bucket on an Outpost server. The company would need to set up the S3 bucket in an AWS Region, see Networking for S3 on Outposts.
Refer to overall service availabilities at Edge, which includes oOutposts, in extending your architecture to edge locations depending your application constraints i.e., need to have compute/storage at edge and performing extremely low latency transactions.
AWS partition logically and physically separates groups of AWS Regions. It create logical network isolation with separate credentialed access between Partitions.
- One AWS Region exists only within one partition; each region is connected by internet.
arn:partition:service:region:account-id:resource-type/resource-idEx:
aws — AWS Standard Region
aws-cn — AWS China Region
aws-us-gov — AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
Refer to AWS guide on selecting right AWS partition for your account.
Hope this gives you bird eye level view of AWS presence across geo locations, and few considerations based on your workload’s expectations.