How is AWS built?
AWS is AWS is built on a global infrastructure designed for high availability and low latency.
The infrastructure is built on top of the following components:
Regions
Regions are physical locations worldwide, each containing multiple Availability Zones (AZs).
These are some of the available regions:
- eu-west-1
- us-east-2
- eu-central-1
How many AZs is a region composed by?
A region is composed by at least three AZs and no more than 6.
Most AWS services are region-scoped, (e.g. EC2), meaning that, an EC2 launched on the us-east-1 region, will not be available on the eu-central-2 region).
There are also global-scoped services, available on all regions, such as IAM and S3.
Note: Not all AWS services are available on every region. To check which services are available in which regions, see the AWS region table.
How to chose a region?
The answer to this question will depend on various factors, such as:
- Governance compliance;
- Proximity to customers;
- Availability of AWS services;
- Pricing (can vary from region to region).
Availability Zones (AZs)
Availability zones are isolated data centers within a region that allow fault-tolerant architectures.
How many data centers is an availability composed by?
An availability zone is composed by at least one data center.
Note: All availability zones within a region are linked together through ultra-low latency networking.
Edge Locations (Points of Presence)
Points of Presence are used by CloudFront to cache content closer to users.
Local Zones
Local Zones are extensions on a region that place AWS services physically closer to large population centers of to a specific location.
CloudFront (CDN)
CloudFront is AWS’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.
It delivers content globally with low latency by caching copies of web content (such as websites, videos, APIs, etc.), at edge locations close to users.
AWS Global Accelerator
The AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service designed to improve availability & performance of applications for global users.
It leverages the AWS internal network to optimize the route to an application. (~60% improvement).
