DEV Community: Charisse C. Lorejo

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Charisse C. Lorejo — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:35:02 +0000

Understand the Global Infrastructure of Amazon Web Services

Charisse C. Lorejo — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 02:36:37 +0000

As a beginner of AWS, one of the first things you do is to pick a Region. But why does this matter? What does AWS Global Infrastructure mean?

It may seem little or even insignificant at first but AWS Global Infrastructure is the backbone to all AWS services. It is design to deliver high-speed and high-performance cloud services to all customers worldwide.

We will discuss each major components of the AWS Global Infrastructure namely:

Regions,
Availability Zones,
Data Centers, and
Edge Locations

What are the parts of the AWS Global Infrastructure?

AWS Regions

Image Source

As of 2025, AWS consists of about 33 geographic Regions across the global and even more coming in the future.
Each Region is independent of the others. This separation allows you to choose where your data is stored and where your applications run.
A Region is a separate geographic area—like Singapore, Tokyo, Frankfurt, or Ohio.

Why is it important to choose the right Region?

To reduce latency
To meet compliance or data-residency requirements
To keep your services close to your users

Availability Zones (AZs)

Image Source

Now that we have an idea about region, we now have Availability Zones. Inside every region, there are multiple AZs, typically three(3) or more. An Availability Zone is made up of one or more physically separate data centers within the same Region.

Key Point:

Availability Zones are close enough to provide low latency, but far enough apart to prevent failures from affecting the whole Region.
If one AZ goes down due to power, network, or natural disaster issues, the others remain available. This is why AWS is known for high reliability.

Data Centers

Data centers are the physical buildings that contain:

servers

networking equipment

power and cooling systems

AWS data centers house the actual computing hardware where your cloud resources run.
Each AZ contains multiple data centers to ensure redundancy. When we say your "resources are in the cloud," they really live inside these secure facilities.

Visual Representation

Image Source
This is what the global infrastructure looks like. A region contains three or more AZs, and AZs have data centers that runs the cloud.

Edge Locations

Not every country has an AWS Region, but many countries, including the Philippines, have Edge Locations.
Edge locations are used by services like:

Amazon CloudFront (CDN)

AWS Global Accelerator

Route 53 DNS They act as local access points that cache or route content closer to users.

Why does this matter?

It reduces latency. Instead of your data traveling all the way to the Singapore Region (the closest Region to the Philippines), some content can be served from the Manila edge location, making loading times faster.

Why Do We Need to Understand These Concepts?

Understanding the AWS Global Infrastructure helps you:
1. Choose the Best Region for Your Workloads - Selecting the wrong Region can lead to slow performance or higher costs.

2. Design Highly Available Applications - Using multiple AZs protects your systems from outages.

3. Improve Performance for Global Users - Edge locations help content reach users faster.

4. Meet Compliance and Legal Requirements - Some countries require data to be stored within specific geographic boundaries.
being aware of this can save money.

5. Optimize Cost - Prices vary per Region—being aware of this can save money.

By understanding how Regions, Availability Zones, Data Centers, and Edge Locations work together, users can design cloud solutions that are faster, more secure, and more reliable.

Whether you’re deploying a small web app or managing enterprise-scale systems, knowing how AWS’s infrastructure operates gives you the power to make smarter choices about performance, cost, and resilience in the cloud.

Going Serverless 🤖⚡: How to Launch a Website in less than 15 minutes with AWS Lambda & API Gateway (Beginner-Friendly!)

Charisse C. Lorejo — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 14:49:36 +0000

This article is co-authored with @siosanac

Introducing Amazon Web Services Lambda

What is AWS Lambda? 🤔

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service made by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It lets you run code without managing the servers~! Lambda automatically scales depending on the number of incoming requests, and you pay only for the compute time used only.

How does it work? 💡

AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code in response to events without managing servers. You write single-purpose functions, upload them, and configure triggers.

Why use AWS Lambda?

Now by now you’re still probably not convinced about how lambda can help you 😔. Here are the reasons why many developers chose to use Lamda for building modern cloud-based apps.

No Server Management!

You don’t need to waste your time by maintaining, provisioning, or patching your servers. AWS handles all of the infrastructure’s scaling and availability.

Cost-Efficiency

With this service, you only pay for what you use. That means there will be no charge when you don’t use the utilities. You can be charged for every millisecond of runtime. Lastly, if you need even more resources, Lambda can scale automatically if you want to.

Pricing for Lambda

Lambda has a free tier if you want to experiment with Lambda, it allows you to have 1 million requests per month and this will reset for the other month and then it gives you 400, 000 GB-seconds of computer time per month.

Now if you’re done with experimenting, and you want to get serious the request charge is $0.20 per 1 million requests, Computing charge is $0.0000166667 per GB-second. There’s also an option where you can “rent” a fixed amount of resources it’s called the Ephemeral Storage.

Creating an AWS Account

If you still do not have an Amazon Web Services account, go to this article for a step-by-step guide to start.

Creating a Lambda Function

Now let’s start on creating a Lambda Function! Navigate your AWS Console and search for Lambda in the search bar.

Next, click on the “Create Function” button.

After that, you can name your function anything you want. You can pick any language you prefer in the Runtime and set the Architecture as is, which is x86_64. Scroll down and let’s create our function.

Once you have created your function, this will look something like this.

Scroll down and you can see that there is a Code source. This is where you will put your code snippet and perform operations for your website.

Default Code:

export const handler = async (event) => {
  // TODO implement
  const response = {
    statusCode: 200,
    body: JSON.stringify('Hello from Lambda!'),
  };
  return response;
};

This is still incomplete, for this lambda function to do anything, you must add a trigger first.

Adding a Trigger

Scroll back up and press the add trigger button. For the trigger configuration, select the API Gateway and create a new API. Make sure that it is an HTTP API and configure the security to be open. For now, let the additional settings be on default and add your trigger.

Once you have created your function, this will look something like this.

Once you have added your trigger, scroll down and on the left-hand side, click Trigger, and you should see that you have an API endpoint with a corresponding URL.

If you go to that URL, you might see something like this.

You can see the “Hello from Lambda!” printed out on your page. This is essentially a static website at its simplest level. What is important here is that we have created a trigger for the API gateway so that our Lambda function is exposed to the Internet. Lambda functions can't be called directly via HTTP. API Gateway gives you a RESTful or HTTP endpoint to trigger your Lambda.

Remember:

API Gateway acts like a "bridge"

Static Website: Your frontend, hosted on S3 or other static hosting
API Gateway: The public HTTP endpoint your website can call
Lambda Function: The backend logic, triggered when API Gateway receives a request

Now let’s create our static website with HTML and CSS.

Building the HTML and CSS of the Static Website

Go back to your Lambda Function.

On the bottom left of your browser, click on Code so that you can modify the default code given.

Replace the default code with this code snippet:

export const handler = async (event) => {
  const html = `
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html lang="en">
    <head>
      <meta charset="UTF-8" />
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
      <title>Writers of This Article</title>
      <style>
        body {
          margin: 0;
          font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
          background-color: #1e1e1e;
          color: #d4d4d4;
          display: flex;
          flex-direction: column;
          align-items: center;
          padding: 2rem 1rem;
        }
        h1 {
          color: #0f0;
          font-size: 2rem;
          margin-bottom: 2rem;
          border-bottom: 2px solid #3c3c3c;
          padding-bottom: 0.5rem;
          text-align: center;
        }
        .cards-container {
          display: flex;
          flex-wrap: wrap;
          gap: 2rem;
          justify-content: center;
          width: 100%;
          max-width: 1200px;
        }
        .terminal-loader {
          border: 0.1em solid #333;
          background-color: #1a1a1a;
          color: #0f0;
          font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;
          font-size: 1em;
          padding: 1.5em 1em;
          width: 100%;
          max-width: 30em;
          box-shadow: 0 4px 8px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);
          border-radius: 4px;
          position: relative;
          overflow: hidden;
          box-sizing: border-box;
        }
        .terminal-header {
          position: absolute;
          top: 0;
          left: 0;
          right: 0;
          height: 1.5em;
          background-color: #333;
          border-top-left-radius: 4px;
          border-top-right-radius: 4px;
          padding: 0 0.4em;
          box-sizing: border-box;
        }
        .terminal-controls {
          float: right;
        }
        .control {
          display: inline-block;
          width: 0.6em;
          height: 0.6em;
          margin-left: 0.4em;
          border-radius: 50%;
          background-color: #777;
        }
        .control.close { background-color: #e33; }
        .control.minimize { background-color: #ee0; }
        .control.maximize { background-color: #0b0; }
        .terminal-title {
          float: left;
          line-height: 1.5em;
          color: #eee;
        }
        .text {
          display: inline-block;
          white-space: nowrap;
          overflow: hidden;
          border-right: 0.2em solid green;
          animation:
            typeAndDelete 4s steps(11) infinite,
            blinkCursor 0.5s step-end infinite alternate;
          margin-top: 1.5em;
        }
        .text-1 {
          display: block;
          white-space: normal;
          margin-top: 0.5em;
          color: #d4d4d4;
        }
        @keyframes blinkCursor {
          50% {
            border-right-color: transparent;
          }
        }
        @keyframes typeAndDelete {
          0%, 10% { width: 0; }
          45%, 55% { width: 10em; }
          90%, 100% { width: 0; }
        }
        @media (max-width: 768px) {
          .text {
            white-space: normal;
            animation: none;
            border-right: none;
          }
          .terminal-loader {
            width: 100%;
          }
        }
      </style>
    </head>
    <body>
      <h1>Writers of This Article</h1>
      <div class="cards-container">
        <div class="terminal-loader">
          <div class="terminal-header">
            <div class="terminal-title">Writer 1:</div>
            <div class="terminal-controls">
              <div class="control close"></div>
              <div class="control minimize"></div>
              <div class="control maximize"></div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <div class="text">Cerdic Siosana...</div><br/>
          <div class="text-1">Level: 2nd year BSCS</div><br/>
          <div class="text-1">Hobbies: Writing, Coding, Gaming</div><br/>
          <div class="text-1">Motto:<br>
            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You lost at the moment<br>
            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;you decided to quit.</div>
        </div>
        <div class="terminal-loader">
          <div class="terminal-header">
            <div class="terminal-title">Writer 2:</div>
            <div class="terminal-controls">
              <div class="control close"></div>
              <div class="control minimize"></div>
              <div class="control maximize"></div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <div class="text">Charisse Lorejo...</div><br/>
          <div class="text-1">Level: 1st year BSCS</div><br/>
          <div class="text-1">Hobbies: Drawing, Coding, Driving</div><br/>
          <div class="text-1">Motto:<br>
            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Yesterday is history,<br>
            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;tomorrow is a mystery,<br>
            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;but today is a gift.<br>
            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;That is why it is called the present.<br>
            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;- Master Oogway</div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </body>
    </html>
  `;

  return {
    statusCode: 200,
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'text/html',
    },
    body: html,
  };
};

After that, deploy the changes. If you go back to the same URL and refresh the website. It should display our new and improved website.

There you go! A step-by-step guide to creating a static website using AWS Lambda!

Conclusion

AWS Lambda is a great beginner tool for you to explore Amazon Web Services. There are a lot more that you can use AWS Lambda aside from creating a static website. Moreover, you can also explore other tools that AWS has to offer, like functions for you to run when a trigger is activated by other AWS services–NO SERVERS NEEDED and also technologies like Elastic Cloud Compute(EC2) for servers, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage, and many more waiting for you to be discovered!

Sources

Serverless Computing - AWS Lambda
How to Make a Serverless Website with AWS Lambda (for free)
Beginners Guide To Building a Serverless Website with AWS Lambda and API Gateway
How to create a FREE AWS account and understand the Free Tier: A beginner's guide