Christina Gorton

Posted on May 11, 2020

AWS Global Infrastructure

#career #beginners #aws

AWS Global Infrastructure

Map Overview

AWS has multiple data centers all over the world.

This is so you, the customer, can access their services no matter where you are located around the globe.

Key points:

AWS Serves over a million active customers in more than 190 countries

Currently there are:

61 Availability Zones (AZs)
22 Geographic Regions
A vast network of Edge Locations

Availability Zones: are distinct locations within an AWS Region that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones.

Geographic Regions: a physical location around the world where AWS clusters data centers.

Edge Locations: where end users access services located at AWS.

Regions

Region: a Geographically Distinct Location, which has multiple data centers.

Availability Zones(AZs) = data centers.

Key Points:

Every region is physically isolated and independent of every other region in terms of location, power, and water supply.
This isolation/independence helps with "fail over"
If your servers go down in one locations or region you can count on other regions not being affected.
When AWS launches a new services they typically launch it in US East first.
When you are working with billing in AWS all that billing information appears in the U.S. East region
It doesn't matter if you are utilizing resources in different regions, the billing will always end up in US East one.

You can head over to AWS's Global Infrastructure page to learn more about Regions and see maps of their locations.

North American Regions:

US East (Northern Virginia) Region:

Availability Zones:
6 Launched 2006

US East (Ohio) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2016

US West (Oregon) Region

Availability Zones: 4
Launched 2011
Local Zone: 1
Launched 2019

US West (Northern California) Region

Availability Zones: 3
*Launched 2009

GovCloud (US-West) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2011

GovCloud (US-East) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2018

Canada (Central) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2016

South American Regions

South America (São Paulo) Region

Availability Zones: 3*
Launched 2011

Europe/Middle East/ Africa Regions

Europe (Frankfurt) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2014

Europe (London) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2016

Europe (Paris) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2017

Middle East (Bahrain) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2019

Europe (Ireland) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2007

Europe (Milan) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2020

Europe (Stockholm) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2018

AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2020

Asia Pacific Regions

Mainland China (Beijing) Region

Availability Zones: 2

Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2012

Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region

Availability Zones: 4
*Launched 2011

Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2016

Mainland China (Ningxia) Region

Availability Zones: 3

Asia Pacific (Osaka) Local Region1

Availability Zones: 1
Launched 2018

Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2016

Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region

Availability Zones: 3
Launched 2019

To view what services are available in each Region you can check out AWS's Region Table

Availability Zones

Availability Zones are often referred to as AZs.

An AZ is a data center owned and operated by AWS in which their service is run.

The use of AZ’s give customers the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more:

highly available
fault tolerant
scalable

Key Points:

Data Centers always run more than one AZ.
This allows users to practice high availability. Customers who care about the availability and performance of their applications want to deploy these applications across multi AZ's in the same region.
There are specific AWS services that require the use of more than one AZ to function properly.
Multi AZ- refers to distributing your instances across multiple availability zones so that they fail over.
The latency between AZs in a Region is extremely low. On average it is below 10 milliseconds.

Edge Locations

Key Points:

Edge locations allow users to send data and receive data from AWS faster.
An Edge Location is a data centre owned by a trusted partner of AWS
They have a direct connection to the AWS network.
These data centers are not used for computing or storage.
It's a faster way to connect to AWS where AWS may not have a data centre yet.
Services that would utilize Edge Locations would be:
- Cloud-Front- a CDN
- Route53- for DNS
- A.P.I. Gateway- a way of connecting your Lambda functions with an end point
- S3 - where you want to get your files uploaded to S3 a lot faster.
Allows for low latency

Edge Cases typically outnumber Availability Zones(AZ).

If you check out the Regions and AZs map again you can see the Edge Locations represented as blue dots.

GovCloud

Key Points:

AWS GovCloud Regions allow customers to host sensitive Controlled Unclassified Information and other types of regulated workloads.
GovCloud Regions are only operate by employees who are U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
Only accessible to U.S. entities and account state holders who pass a screening process.
Customers can architect secure cloud solutions that comply with:
- Fed*RAMP* High baseline
- DOJ's Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Security Policy
- U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (TAR)
- Export Administration Regulations (EAR)
- Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide
GovCloud Regions are currently only in the US.

You can view their regions on AWS Map of Regions and Edge Networks.

You can view more about GovCloud on the official AWS GovCloud page.