🌍Exam Guide: Cloud Practitioner
Domain 3: Cloud Technology & Services
📘Task Statement 3.2
🎯What Is This Task Testing?
You must be able to explain the building blocks of AWS global infrastructure and how they relate:
- Regions, Availability Zones (AZs), and Edge Locations
- How AWS infrastructure supports high availability
- When to use multiple AZs vs multiple Regions
- Benefits of edge locations (e.g., CloudFront, Global Accelerator)
- What AWS Local Zones and AWS Wavelength Zones are used for
1) 🧱 Core Building Blocks of the AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS Regions
A Region is a geographic area, for example, a country or part of a continent, that contains multiple Availability Zones:
- You choose a Region when deploying resources.
- Regions help with data residency/data sovereignty, latency, and disaster recovery planning.
Availability Zones (AZs)
An Availability Zone is one or more data centers within a Region designed for fault isolation:
- A Region contains multiple AZs.
- AZs are separate from each other to reduce the chance that a single failure impacts all of them.
- AZs are connected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking.
Edge Locations
Edge locations are AWS sites designed to bring services closer to end users for lower latency and improved performance:
- Edge locations are commonly associated with content delivery and edge networking services.
- You typically don’t “deploy your whole app” to an edge location the same way you deploy to a Region, instead, AWS services use them to serve content or accelerate traffic.
2) 🔗 Relationship Among Regions, AZs, and Edge Locations
A simple way to visualize it:
- Region: a geographic area
- AZs: multiple isolated locations inside a Region
- Edge Locations: distributed sites closer to users around the world
You deploy most workloads in a Region, design for high availability across multiple AZs, and use Edge Locations to improve end-user performance.
3) 🛡️ Achieving High Availability with Multiple AZs
High availability means your application continues to run even when something fails.
How to achieve Hight Availabiity
- Deploy resources across at least two AZs in the same Region.
- Use load balancing and redundancy so failure in one AZ does not bring down the application.
Why multiple AZs matter
Availability Zones are designed to not share single points of failure.
That means a power, cooling, or facility issue in one AZ is less likely to impact another AZ in the same Region.
“high availability” within a Region? Then the expected design is a multi-AZ solution.
4) 🧭 When to Use Multiple Regions
You use multiple Regions when you need separation at a broader geographic level than AZs can provide:
- Disaster Recovery (DR): recover if a full Region is unavailable
- Business Continuity: maintain operations during major disruptions
- Low Latency for Global Users: place workloads closer to different user populations
- Data Sovereignty/Residency: keep data in a specific country/Region to meet legal requirements
Multi-AZ vs Multi-Region
- Multi-AZ: high availability within a Region
- Multi-Region: disaster recovery, global reach, sovereignty needs
5) ⚡ Benefits of Edge Locations
Edge locations help reduce latency by moving content and entry points closer to users.
Amazon CloudFront (CDN)
- Caches and delivers content (web pages, images, video, APIs) from locations near users.
- Improves performance and reduces load on origin infrastructure.
AWS Global Accelerator
- Improves availability and performance by routing user traffic onto the AWS global network and directing it to optimal regional endpoints.
“speed up content delivery worldwide” → CloudFront.
“improve global application performance and routing to endpoints” → Global Accelerator.
6) 🧩 AWS Local Zones and AWS Wavelength Zones
AWS Local Zones
Local Zones place select AWS services closer to large population/industry centers to support workloads needing very low latency to a specific metro area.
Use Local Zones When: you need low latency to a particular city/metro region (and want AWS-managed infrastructure closer than a traditional Region).
AWS Wavelength Zones
Wavelength Zones bring AWS services to the edge of 5G networks (in partnership with telecom providers).
Use Wavelength Zones When: you need ultra-low latency for mobile/5G use cases such as near-real-time gaming, AR/VR, IoT, or video processing close to mobile users.
✅ Quick Exam-Style Summary
- Region: geographic area containing multiple AZs.
- AZs: isolated locations within a Region, designed to avoid shared single points of failure.
- High Availability: is commonly achieved by deploying across multiple AZs.
- Use multiple Regions for DR/business continuity, global low latency, and data sovereignty.
- Edge locations: improve end-user performance (CloudFront) and traffic routing (Global Accelerator).
- Local Zones: low latency to specific metro areas.
- Wavelength Zones: low latency at the 5G network edge.
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