AWS Swiss Region: Zürich
More than 1 year ago AWS announced a new Region in Zürich, Switzerland. It will be online in the second half of this year, it could be happens in July or in December, we still don’t know exactly.
But before talking about the benefits for the Swiss companies, let’s spent few minutes understanding what is a Region and the AWS physical infrastructure.
Is a physical location around the world where we cluster data centers. We call each group of logical data centers an Availability Zone. Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate AZs within a geographic area.
Ok, pretty clear, a Region is a cluster of Availability Zones 🤔… wait! What is an Availability Zone?
An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. […] All AZs in an AWS Region are interconnected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, over fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber providing high-throughput, low-latency networking between AZs. All traffic between AZs is encrypted. The network performance is sufficient to accomplish synchronous replication between AZs. […] If an application is partitioned across AZs, companies are better isolated and protected from issues such as power outages, lightning strikes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and more. AZs are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other.
Ok, now is definitively more clear 💡, AZ is the real core for High Availability and redundancy, you (as AWS customer) should use all the benefits of multi AZ deployments to increase your availability, deploying an application on more AZ does not increase the latency in a significant way (ok, it depends, if you have an HPC application maybe is relevant). Remember that even if you deploy in a single AZ you are using “one or more data centers”, so if you really need the lower latency as possible take a look to placement groups.
When you choose the services to use, you can select services that run at AZ level like EC2 and RDS or services at Region level like S3 and DynamoDB, so choosing the right services can automatically increase the availability of your infrastructure.
“Everything Fails All the Time” is what Werner Vogels remember us, and AWS is not an exception. The new Region in Zürich will have 3 AZs, this will allow you to create resilient solutions, 2 AZs are not enough, if one of them has a problem (and it will happens…) you remain with only one and with a possible single point of failure.
A Region assume the name of a geographical zone, for example a city/state, this is important for the data sovereignty: when you save your data in a Region, the data will not leave the Region until you don’t explicitly expose or transfer them; obviously this aspect is critical in bank and financial applications, for Swiss DPA or European GDPR and so on. If you want to read more take a look to AWS Data Privacy page.
We will discuss further about availability and data sovereignty in the next posts.
At this point there should be no more doubts about the AWS infrastructure and the main advantages of a local Region should be clear, but if you desire to receive more information or be supported by an AWS Partner feel free to contact Claranet Switzerland.
Original post here
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