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AWS Global Infrastructure🔗

The components of AWS Global Infra are:

  • Availability Zones (AZs)
  • Regions
  • Edge Locations
  • Regional Edge Caches
  • Local Zones
  • Wavelength Zones
  • Outposts

Availability Zones (AZs)

  • Physical data-centers of AWS
  • Multiple Physical data-centers close enough together form one Availability Zone
  • Each AZ will have at least nearby sister AZ(probably in nearby city) which is connected via very low latency private fibre optic (used by many AWS Services to replicate data : Read up synchronous and asynchronous replication)
    • Note Both AZ will be separate power resources and network connectivity
    • This is all because of resilience and availability purpose.
  • Making use of 2 AZs in one Region ensures your infra remains stable, available, and resilient even in worse times

Region

  • Collection of AZs that are located geographically close to each other
  • Every Region works independently of others and will have atleast 2 AZs
  • Having global regions allows organisation to comply with local laws to store data
  • Use mulitple region if you are a global organisation and downtime may cost money
  • Currently there 32 Regions and 102 AZs. (Note : this number may have changed)
  • Note : not all services are available in every region. IAM and CloudFront are global Services
  • AWS GovCloud is a region only available to approved US Companies
  • Naming convention of region : region-direction-number

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NOTE : AWS maps these AZ letters to different AZs for different AWS Accounts for ensuring even distribution of resources across all AZs within a Region.

Edge Locations :

  • AWS Sites deployed in Major Cities and highly populated areas across the globe.
  • Outnumber AZs
  • Utilised for services such as CloudFront and Lambda to cache data and reduce latency for end-users by using Edge Locations as CDN.

Regional Edge Cache

  • These Edge Location sit between your CloudFront Origin servers and the Edge Locations.
  • Large Cache-width than each of individual Edge Locations
  • Data is retained at Regional Edge Cache while it expires at Edge Locations

Local Zones

  • 2022 : Amazon launches first 16 Local Zones
  • Local Zone : a new type of infrastructure deployment designed to place core AWS Compute, Storage, Networking & Database services near highly populated areas.
  • All Local Zones will be connected to a parent Region, allowing seamless connection between other AWS Services.
  • Available in 33 metropolitan areas (19 more planned)

Wavelength Zones

  • Similar to Local Zones but differs how it connects to its parent Region i.e. 5G mobile broadband networks and re deployed within the data centers of large telecommunication providers.
  • AWS Wavelength Zones are available through Verizon in US, KDDI in Japan, SK Telecom in South Korea, Vodafone in UK/Germany & Bell in Canada

Outposts

  • brings capabilites of AWS Cloud to your on-premises data center, includes same hardware used by AWS in their data centres
  • allows users to use native AWS services, including the same tools and APIs you would use when running your infra within AWS.
  • available as 1U or 2U rack-mountable servers, or as 42U racks that can be scaled to 96 racks
  • provides PrivateLink Gateway endpoints to securely and privately connect to other services and resources such as DynamoDB
  • aws will patch and update those servers