Regional Edge Cache
In November 2016, AWS announced a new type of Edge Location, called a Regional Edge Cache.
These sit between your CloudFront Origin servers and the Edge Locations. A Regional Edge Cache
has a larger cache width than each of the individual Edge Locations, and because data expires from
the cache at the Edge Locations, the data is retained at the Regional Edge Caches.
Therefore, when data is requested at the Edge Location that is no longer available, the Edge Location
can retrieve the cached data from the Regional Edge Cache instead of the Origin servers, which would
have a higher latency.
Local Zones
In 2022, Amazon announced that it had launched its first 16 Local Zones, a new type of infrastructure
deployment designed to place core AWS Compute, Storage, Networking, and Database services near
highly populated areas such as major cities that do not already have an AWS Region nearby. For
example, the eastern United States has two Regions: us-east-1 in northern Virginia and us-east-2 in
Ohio. However, there are also very large metropolitan areas around Boston, New York City,
Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Miami, all of which are 100 miles or more from the data centers in that
Region’s nearest Availability Zones. AWS Local Zones allow customers in these areas to deploy
resources and applications that require single-digit millisecond latency that would otherwise not be
attainable given the geographic distance to the nearest Regions. They are also useful where data
residency requirements may dictate that data be stored within certain geographic boundaries.
All AWS Local Zones are connected to a parent Region, allowing you to seamlessly connect to all
other AWS services via a secure, dedicated high-speed connection. AWS Local Zones are currently
available in a total of 33 metropolitan areas, with an additional 19 planned in the future. To use Local
Zones, you must first enable them within your AWS account. After that, all Local Zones will be listed
alongside the Availability Zones within that Region and can be selected when deploying everything
from VPC subnets, to EC2 instances and EBS volumes, to ECS and EKS clusters.
In August 2023, AWS announced Dedicated Local Zones, which offer dedicated, fully managed
infrastructure that is built for the exclusive use of a specific customer or community. Dedicated Local
Zones can be deployed in an existing on-premises data center or other locations that may be dictated
by a customer or community’s requirements to comply with security or other data sovereignty
regulations for mission-critical and other sensitive workloads. These are especially useful in the
public sector and other industries where strict governance controls are necessary to comply with
local laws and regulations.
Wavelength Zones
Much like AWS Local Zones, AWS Wavelength Zones also place core AWS services closer to large
end user bases and are connected to a parent Region via a secure, dedicated high-speed connection.
However, AWS Wavelength Zones are embedded within 5G mobile broadband networks and are
deployed within the data centers of large telecommunications providers. Deploying AWS resources
such as VPC subnets, EC2 instances, and EBS volumes to an AWS Wavelength Zone allows end users
to connect to these resources without ever leaving the mobile provider’s network. By reducing the
number of network hops and eliminating the need for any traffic to traverse the public internet,
developers can offer ultra-low latency and increased reliability for 5G applications such as live video
streaming and interactive gaming. AWS Wavelength Zones are currently available through Verizon in
the United States, KDDI in Japan, SK Telecom in South Korea, Vodafone in the UK and Germany, and
Bell in Canada.
Outposts
AWS Outposts brings the capabilities of the AWS cloud to your on-premises data center. This
includes the same hardware used by AWS within their data centers, allowing you to use native AWS
services, including the same tools and APIs you would use when running your infrastructure within
AWS. Outposts are available as 1U or 2U rack-mountable servers, or as entire 42U racks that can be
scaled to deployments of up to 96 racks. Outposts may be connected to AWS using either a Direct
Connect or VPN connection. Outposts allow you to run AWS services such as EC2, ECS, EKS, S3, RDS,
and EMR on-premises. Customers can also make use of PrivateLink gateway endpoints to securely
and privately connect to other services and resources, such as DynamoDB. There are a wide number
of EC2 instance types available on AWS Outposts. These include M5, C5, and R5 instances, as well as
storage options for EBS volumes, local disks, and local instance storage.
Because AWS Outposts are fully managed, you do not need to maintain a level of patch management
across your infrastructure or worry about installing or updating any software. AWS will ensure your
Outposts are patched and updated as needed.
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