AWS Global Infrastructure: Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations

AWS (Amazon Web Services) powers businesses worldwide with its robust and expansive global infrastructure, designed to meet the high demands of scalability, reliability, and performance. This infrastructure is what makes AWS a preferred choice for enterprises, startups, and developers alike.

In this article, we’ll get into AWS’s regions, availability zones (AZs), and edge locations—the fundamental building blocks of its architecture. Understanding these components is crucial to leveraging AWS effectively for your applications.

What is AWS Global Infrastructure?

AWS’s global infrastructure is a collection of regions, availability zones, and edge locations spread across the globe. These are purposefully distributed to provide:

1. High Availability: Fault tolerance and minimized downtime.
2. Scalability: Support for applications with growing demands.
3. Global Reach: Access to AWS services from virtually anywhere.
4. Low Latency: Faster response times by bringing services closer to users.

AWS's infrastructure offers an unparalleled level of reliability and ensures businesses can deploy, manage, and scale applications seamlessly.

AWS Regions

Let us now learn about AWS regions, their importance, and their characteristics with examples.

What Are AWS Regions?

An AWS Region is a physical location spread over a large geographical area. Each region consists of multiple, isolated data centers known as availability zones (AZs). AWS currently operates 30+ regions worldwide, with more planned for the future.

Why Regions Are Important?

Regions allow businesses to:

• Deploy their applications in specific geographic locations for compliance and regulatory needs (e.g., GDPR in the EU).
• Minimize latency by choosing regions closer to end-users.
• Isolate workloads to prevent failures in one region from affecting another.

Key Characteristics of AWS Regions

1. Independence: Each region is self-contained and geographically separated to ensure fault isolation.
2. Local Laws Compliance: Regions cater to local data residency laws.
3. Customized Deployments: Businesses can select regions based on proximity and performance requirements.

Examples of AWS Regions

• US East (N. Virginia): Popular for general workloads and low-cost infrastructure.
• Asia Pacific (Mumbai): Serves businesses in India and surrounding regions.
• Europe (Frankfurt): Complies with stringent European data protection laws.

How to Choose an AWS Region?

When selecting a region, consider the following:

1. Latency: Choose the region closest to your primary user base.
2. Cost: Pricing for AWS services varies across regions.
3. Regulatory Compliance: Some regions meet specific legal requirements for data.

Here’s a map of AWS regions globally:

Availability Zones (AZs)

Let us now learn about AWS Availability Zones, their importance, and their characteristics with examples.

What Are Availability Zones?

An Availability Zone (AZ) is a logical data centre within a region. Each region contains at least two AZs to ensure high availability and redundancy.

Key Characteristics of AZs

1. Isolation: Each AZ is isolated from others within the same region to prevent a single point of failure.
2. Proximity: AZs are physically close enough for low-latency operations but far enough to avoid simultaneous failures.
3. High-Speed Networking: All AZs are interconnected with high-speed, low-latency fibre.

Why Use Availability Zones?

• Fault Tolerance: If one AZ goes offline, the application can continue running in another AZ.
• Redundancy: Ensures critical workloads remain operational.
• Scalability: Easily scale resources within the same region across multiple AZs.

Use Case Example

Suppose you’re hosting a critical web application. By deploying instances across multiple AZs, you can ensure:

• Zero Downtime: If one AZ faces an outage, traffic can automatically route to another AZ.
• Improved Performance: Load balancing can distribute traffic across AZs.

Code Example: Deploying EC2 Instances (will learn about EC2 instances in the upcoming articles) in Multiple AZs

# Create an EC2 instance in each AZ
aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id ami-0abcd12345efgh678 \
  --count 1 \
  --instance-type t2.micro \
  --key-name MyKeyPair \
  --subnet-id subnet-12345678 \
  --availability-zone us-east-1a

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id ami-0abcd12345efgh678 \
  --count 1 \
  --instance-type t2.micro \
  --key-name MyKeyPair \
  --subnet-id subnet-87654321 \
  --availability-zone us-east-1b

Note: Don't worry if you did not understand the code, you will understand it in the article series.

Edge Locations

Let us now learn about AWS Edge Locations, their importance, and their characteristics with examples.

What Are Edge Locations?

Edge locations are part of AWS’s Content Delivery Network (CDN), Amazon CloudFront. These locations cache content closer to end-users, improving application speed and reliability.

Key Benefits of Edge Locations

1. Reduced Latency: Serve content from the nearest location to the user.
2. Improved User Experience: Faster load times for media and static content.
3. Global Reach: Ideal for applications targeting a global audience.

Use Case Example

• Media Streaming: Netflix uses edge locations to deliver videos efficiently.
• E-Commerce Websites: Faster load times for product images and catalogs.

Code Example: Setting up Amazon CloudFront

Here’s how you can create a CloudFront (will learn about CloudFront in the upcoming articles) distribution to serve content from edge locations:

const AWS = require('aws-sdk');
const cloudfront = new AWS.CloudFront();

const params = {
  DistributionConfig: {
    CallerReference: 'unique-string',
    Origins: {
      Quantity: 1,
      Items: [
        {
          Id: 'MyS3Origin',
          DomainName: 'mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com',
          S3OriginConfig: {
            OriginAccessIdentity: '',
          },
        },
      ],
    },
    DefaultCacheBehavior: {
      TargetOriginId: 'MyS3Origin',
      ViewerProtocolPolicy: 'redirect-to-https',
      AllowedMethods: {
        Quantity: 2,
        Items: ['GET', 'HEAD'],
      },
      CachedMethods: {
        Quantity: 2,
        Items: ['GET', 'HEAD'],
      },
    },
    Enabled: true,
  },
};

cloudfront.createDistribution(params, (err, data) => {
  if (err) console.error(err);
  else console.log(data); // Distribution created!
});

Why AWS Global Infrastructure is a Game-Changer

1. Low Latency: Delivers faster application performance by reducing data travel time.
2. Scalability: Resources can be scaled up or down seamlessly to meet demand.
3. Reliability: Redundant architecture ensures minimal downtime.
4. Global Reach: With 450+ edge locations, AWS ensures global service coverage.

Conclusion and What’s Next?

Understanding AWS’s global infrastructure is fundamental to building reliable, scalable, and high-performing applications. By leveraging regions, availability zones, and edge locations, businesses can achieve optimal performance, compliance, and redundancy.

In the next article, we’ll cover AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)—the core of AWS security. You’ll learn how to create users, manage roles, and implement secure access policies.