The AWS Global Infrastructure is a system of regions, availability zones, and edge locations that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has established or will soon establish in order to provide the most reliable and efficient cloud-based compute and storage services available. AWS has established 17 regions around the globe and each region consists of multiple availability zones. An availability zone is a physical location within a region that is made up of one or more distinct data centers, all supported by redundant power, networking, and connectivity. AWS also has established edge locations around the world to provide a low latency connection for end-users. This article will discuss the various components of the AWS Global Infrastructure and how AWS customers can leverage it to achieve high availability and low latency for their applications and services.
Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations
AWS currently has 17 regions located around the world. Each region is made up of multiple availability zones, typically 3 – 5 zones per region. Availability Zones provide AWS customers the option to deploy their applications and services in multiple distinct data centers within a given region. Each Availability Zone is made up of multiple distinct data centers and these data centers have redundant power, cooling, and connectivity. This redundancies helps ensure that the applications and services running in an Availability Zone are highly available and resilient to outages. AWS also provides Edge Locations, which are located in various cities around the world and provide a low latency connection to the services and applications hosted in AWS.
Leveraging Availability Zones for High Availability
By leveraging multiple availability zones within a region, AWS customers can create highly available applications and services. This is because Availability Zones are made up of multiple distinct data centers that are connected to each other but are designed to not share a single point of failure. This means that if one Availability Zone fails, the other Availability Zones can still provide compute and storage services to applications and services running within the region. This allows AWS customers to build applications and services that are resilient even to major outages and it is one of the primary benefits of using the AWS Global Infrastructure.
Furthermore, with multiple Availability Zones, AWS customers can deploy their applications and services across multiple data centers in order to take advantage of the geographic diversity of the Availability Zones. By deploying applications and services across multiple Availability Zones, AWS customers can ensure that their applications and services remain highly available and resilient even in the event of a major outage.
Edge Locations for Low Latency Connections
In addition to Regions and Availability Zones, AWS provides Edge Locations which are located in various cities around the world. Edge Locations are designed to provide low latency connections to the services and applications hosted in AWS. By leveraging Edge Locations, AWS customers can ensure that their applications and services can be accessed from anywhere in the world with minimal latency.
Edge Locations also provide an additional benefit for AWS customers as they can be used to cache content for delivery to end-users. AWS provides a service called Amazon CloudFront which is a content delivery network (CDN) that leverages Edge Locations to deliver content quickly to end-users. With CloudFront, customers can reduce the load on their origin server and reduce the latency of content delivery.
Using Multiple Regions for Disaster Recovery
AWS customers can also take advantage of multiple regions in order to create disaster recovery and business continuity plans. By replicating data across multiple regions, customers can ensure that their applications and services can remain available even in the event of a major disaster. Additionally, customers can also use multiple regions to ensure that their data does not leave a specific jurisdiction in order to comply with data sovereignty laws.
In addition, customers can also use multiple regions to deliver content to end-users with low latency. By leveraging edge locations across multiple regions, customers can deliver content faster to end-users by delivering it from the region that is closest to the end-user. This can improve the user experience while also reducing bandwidth costs.
Benefits of Edge Locations
Edge Locations provide the benefit of low latency connections to services and applications hosted in AWS. In addition, Edge Locations also provide the benefit of caching for content delivery. With Amazon CloudFront, customers can leverage Edge Locations to deliver content quickly to end-users. CloudFront can be used to reduce the load on an origin server and to reduce the latency of content delivery. CloudFront also provides customers with the flexibility to configure their content delivery network to optimize for performance and cost.
In addition, Edge Locations can also be used to provide access to applications and services stored in other regions. By leveraging Edge Locations, customers can provide low latency connections to applications and services stored in other regions, even if the original region is experiencing an outage.
Conclusion
The AWS Global Infrastructure is a system of regions, availability zones, and edge locations that are designed to provide the most reliable and efficient cloud-based compute and storage services available. AWS customers can leverage the features of the AWS Global Infrastructure to achieve high availability and low latency connections to their applications and services. By using multiple availability zones within a region, customers can ensure that their applications remain available even in the event of an outage. Additionally, customers can also use multiple regions to replicate data and achieve business continuity. Finally, edge locations can be used to provide low latency connections and to cache content for quick delivery to end-users.
Statistics
AWS currently has 17 regions located around the world and each region is made up of multiple distinct Availability Zones. AWS also has more than 150 Edge Locations located in heavily populated cities around the world. Furthermore, Amazon CloudFront has more than 150 points of presence, which are locations in data centers and network points around the world where content is cached and served. AWS has invested billions of dollars in its infrastructure over the years in order to provide customers with the most reliable and efficient cloud-based services available.