When building applications on AWS, one of the most common architectural mistakes is thinking only at the regional level and ignoring the global picture.
AWS is fundamentally designed as a global cloud platform, with services that operate at:
Global scope (e.g. Route 53, CloudFront, IAM)
Regional scope (e.g. EC2, RDS, Lambda)
Availability Zone scope (e.g. subnets, EC2 instances)
Understanding how these layers work together is essential for designing highly available, low‑latency, and resilient systems.
In this article, we’ll explore the global and regional perspectives of AWS architecture and how they interconnect in a production-ready application.
By examining the tiers that make up such an application, you will better understand how to optimize cloud-based infrastructure for high availability, performance, and reliability.
Global AWS Architecture
Global architecture answers one key question:
How do users from anywhere in the world reliably reach my application?
Example Scenario
Let's take for instance a global football streaming platform with users in Europe, North America, and Africa. Always our goals should be:
- Low latency for users
- High availability
- Automatic failover if a region goes down
Amazon Route 53
Route 53 is AWS’s global DNS service. It routes user traffic to the best AWS region based on:
- Latency‑based routing
- Health checks
- Geolocation or geoproximity
If one region becomes unhealthy, Route 53 can automatically route traffic to another region.
Amazon CloudFront
CloudFront is AWS’s global Content Delivery Network (CDN).
It caches static and dynamic content at edge locations close to users, reducing latency and offloading traffic from your regional infrastructure.
Regional AWS Architecture
Once traffic reaches a region, regional architecture determines how your application actually runs.
A best‑practice approach is to organize services into logical tiers. This architecture is organized into different functional tiers, each responsible for specific aspects of the application.
Web Tier
Initially, communications from customers will generally enter the web tier making this regional based AWS service such as an Application Load Balancer (ALB) or API gateway depending on the architecture that the application uses.
The purpose of the web tier is to act as an entry point for regional based applications whilst abstracting customers away from the underlying infrastructures. This in simple terms means that infrastructure can scale or fail or change without impacting customers or user experience.
Tier 2: Compute Tier
The functionality provide to the user/customer via the web tier is provided by the compute tier using services such as Amazon EC2, Lamba or containers.
In the instance given earlier, In this tier a load balancer will be responsible for serving request Amazon EC2 instances whilst handling auto scaling for demand spikes, multi-AZ deployment.
Tier 3: Storage Tier
The compute tier will consume storage services which is another part of all AWS architecture (global) and, this tier will use services such as Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store), Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) for different media storage use cases and also quite useful with data resiliency (e.g S3 CRR).
Tier 4: Database Tier
In addition to file storage, most environment require data storage and within AWS, this is delivered using varieties of AWS services including Relational database system (Amazon RDS), Amazon Aurora, DynamoDB and Redshift for data warehousing.
In order to improve performance of streaming applications direct access to the database is not always best practice, instead it’s best for application to go via proxy or caching layer with AWS Amazon ElastiCache for general caching or DynamoDB accelerator(DAX) when using Amazon dynamoDB, consulting the cache first and only if the data is not present in the cache layer will the database be consulted and the content of the cache will then be updated.
One advantage of caching is that generally caching is in-memory so it’s cheap and fast which helps with cost management because databases tend to be expensive based on the volume of data required.
Tier 5: Application Services
The Application Services Tier provides decoupling and asynchronous processing functionalities such as streaming, messaging, or workflow orchestration wiht lambda or step function. Amazon Kinesis can handle real-time data streaming, useful for analytics or delivering live match updates.
Conclusion
AWS architecture is most effective when you think in layers:
- Global services handle routing, performance, and resilience
- Regional services handle compute, storage, and data processing
By combining both perspectives, you can design systems that are not only scalable and cost‑effective, but also resilient by default.
If you’re preparing for AWS certifications or designing real‑world systems, mastering this mental model will pay off every time.
If you’re an AWS Community Builder or cloud enthusiast, feel free to share your own architectural patterns or lessons learned in the comments.
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