AWS Global Infrastructure

Introduction

AWS is a global cloud platform powered by a global infrastructure that consists of a network of data centers and facilities around the world.

AWS provides cloud computing services to millions of customers, and its global infrastructure is designed to ensure high availability, reliability, and low-latency access to its services.

Components

There are four key components that form the backbone of the AWS global infrastructure:
  • Regions
  • Availability Zones
  • Edge Locations
  • Local Zones

Regions

A region is a geographical area where AWS has established a presence to host its cloud computing services. Each AWS region is essentially a separate and independent data center infrastructure, strategically located around the world.
With this separation, cloud architects have the ability to design highly available applications that operate across multiple regions. In the event of a specific region experiencing downtime, the applications remain functional because the operations in the unaffected region are not impacted by the issues in the downed region. This approach enhances resilience and ensures continuous service availability, reinforcing the robustness of the overall architecture.

Maple

Regions exist around the world, providing businesses with the opportunity to deploy their applications and solutions in the closest geographical proximity to their customers. This strategic placement facilitates low-latency access, contributing to improved application performance and a more responsive user experience. By leveraging AWS regions, businesses can optimize the geographical distribution of their resources, ensuring efficient delivery of services and minimizing the time it takes for data to travel between end-users and the deployed infrastructure.
AWS presently operates 33 regions globally, each distinguished by a unique name and code. Additionally, they have plans to launch an additional 6 regions in the near future.
When interacting with an AWS service, your actions are confined to a designated region. For example, if you wish to provision an EC2 instance (a virtual machine), you must select a specific region, as an EC2 instance in the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) region is distinct from an EC2 instance in the eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) region. Some services do not necessitate the selection of a specific region these are referred to as global services.

Avalabilty Zone

Each AWS region comprises a minimum of three Availability Zones (AZs) and may extend to include four, five, or six AZs. These Availability Zones are meticulously separated, ensuring that the failure of a specific AZ does not impact the functionality of the others. They are interconnected through high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, further enhancing the overall reliability and resilience of the infrastructure.

AWS does not explicitly disclose the composition of an Availability Zone (AZ), but it can be either a single data center or multiple data centers.

In the context of the earlier example, when provisioning an EC2 instance, we must also select a specific Availability Zone (AZ) inside the region since an EC2 instance operates exclusively within a single AZ.

Additionally, since EC2 is a private service, it operates only from a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). A VPC represents a secluded cloud network segmented into subnets, which can be classified as either private or public. Explicit configuration is essential to facilitate communication between the internet and any resource provisioned within the VPC.

The final architecture:

Edge locations

Edge locations are AWS data centers designed to deliver services with the lowest latency possible. Amazon has dozens of these data centers spread across the world. They’re closer to users than Regions or Availability Zones, often in major cities, so responses can be fast and snappy.

Edge locations are used for a number of AWS features like CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator

CloudFront
CloudFront is the most commonly discussed use of edge locations. It’s a content delivery network that caches content in edge locations. Content can be served directly from the cache, so it gets to users faster. CloudFront is often used to serve static assets, speed up websites, and stream video.

Notice that there are two types of Edge Locations local edges and regional edges. This mechanism operates by first checking the local edge. If there's a hit, the request is immediately returned. Otherwise, it checks the closest regional edges. If cached data exists, it is returned to the user. If not, the regional edge retrieves the data from the original source such as S3 and this done via CloudFront, returns it, and caches it for future requests.

AWS Global Accelerator
AWS Global Accelerator allows you to route requests for key resources through Amazon’s global network—even if the request is going halfway round the world. The request is initially routed to the closest edge location and then travels through Amazon’s network—often with lower latency and higher throughput than the public internet.

Note: you can’t run your workloads directly in edge locations, they’re only used by Amazon’s managed services.

Local zones

Local Zones are an infrastructure deployment concept from Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed to bring AWS services closer to a specific geographic area, providing users with low-latency access to resources and applications.

Local Zones are an extension of the main AWS Regions and are ideal for latency-sensitive workloads or applications that require real-time processing.

These zones are often situated in large metropolitan areas and provide a selection of AWS services, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), among others. By deploying resources in a Local Zone, customers can reduce latency for end-users in that particular location, improving application performance and responsiveness.

In the example above, we observe the provisioning of an EC2 instance within a local zone. Notably, the VPC demonstrates the capability to extend seamlessly from the region into the local zone. This integration showcases the flexibility and continuity of the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) architecture, allowing resources to span across both the AZ and its associated local zone

Conclusion

AWS Global Infrastructure is a robust cloud platform with key components—Regions, Availability Zones, Edge Locations, and Local Zones. These components ensure high availability, resilience, and low-latency access to cloud services worldwide.

In conclusion, AWS's infrastructure provides a flexible and responsive foundation, empowering businesses with efficient and reliable cloud solutions globally.