AWS global infrastructure

In this lesson, you'll explore the AWS global infrastructure and its essential components—Regions, Availability Zones, Edge Locations, and Local Zones. These elements work in unison to enable you to design scalable, highly available, and resilient architectures.

Regions

An AWS region is a geographic area where you deploy your resources. AWS's extensive network spans multiple regions around the globe, allowing you to choose the optimal location for hosting your application. For example, if your target audience is in Australia, you can select one of the Australian regions.

Each region is isolated to ensure that an outage in one does not affect the others. When selecting a region, consider:

• Service availability (not every AWS service is offered in all regions).
• Regulatory and compliance requirements (such as AWS GovCloud for sensitive applications).
• Cost structures.
• Data residency and legal considerations (for instance, GDPR for EU data).

For the latest and detailed list of AWS regions—including both deployed and planned regions—visit the AWS global infrastructure page.

Additionally, AWS’s website offers updated views in both map and list formats to help you select the region that best aligns with your application’s requirements.

Availability Zones

Within each region, AWS provides Availability Zones (AZs)—one or more isolated data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity. Distributing your applications across multiple AZs within the same region significantly reduces the risk of downtime.

For example, if you deploy all your resources in a single AZ and that zone experiences an outage, your entire application may become unavailable. Spreading resources across multiple AZs increases fault tolerance and ensures continuous service availability.

Edge Locations

Edge locations are strategically located sites that significantly reduce latency through content caching. They form the backbone of the AWS Content Delivery Network (CDN), powered by AWS CloudFront, and serve static content (such as videos, images, and web pages) directly to end users.

Keep in mind that edge locations are designed solely for content delivery and do not support compute services like EC2.

Local Zones

Local Zones extend AWS regions by bringing select services—such as compute and storage—closer to major urban centers. These zones offer a high-bandwidth and secure connection back to the parent region, making them ideal for real-time, low-latency applications like gaming, live streaming, or interactive virtual workstations.

Comparing Edge Locations and Local Zones

Both edge locations and local zones are designed to bring services closer to end users and reduce latency, but their roles differ:

• Local zones are extensions of an AWS region and provide a subset of services (for example, EC2 and EBS). They are typically situated in major metropolitan areas and maintain a close, high-bandwidth connection to the parent region.
• Edge locations, on the other hand, are independent points of presence primarily used for content delivery via AWS CloudFront, and they do not support general compute services.

Recap

Below is a summary of the key components of the AWS global infrastructure: