DEV Community: nyong godwill

AWS Global Infrastructure: Regional Edge Caches, Local Zones, Wavelength Zones, And Outposts

nyong godwill — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 19:37:10 +0000

Regional Edge Cache

In November 2016, AWS announced a new type of Edge Location, called a Regional Edge Cache.
These sit between your CloudFront Origin servers and the Edge Locations. A Regional Edge Cache
has a larger cache width than each of the individual Edge Locations, and because data expires from
the cache at the Edge Locations, the data is retained at the Regional Edge Caches.

Therefore, when data is requested at the Edge Location that is no longer available, the Edge Location
can retrieve the cached data from the Regional Edge Cache instead of the Origin servers, which would
have a higher latency.

Local Zones

In 2022, Amazon announced that it had launched its first 16 Local Zones, a new type of infrastructure
deployment designed to place core AWS Compute, Storage, Networking, and Database services near
highly populated areas such as major cities that do not already have an AWS Region nearby. For
example, the eastern United States has two Regions: us-east-1 in northern Virginia and us-east-2 in
Ohio. However, there are also very large metropolitan areas around Boston, New York City,
Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Miami, all of which are 100 miles or more from the data centers in that
Region’s nearest Availability Zones. AWS Local Zones allow customers in these areas to deploy
resources and applications that require single-digit millisecond latency that would otherwise not be
attainable given the geographic distance to the nearest Regions. They are also useful where data
residency requirements may dictate that data be stored within certain geographic boundaries.

All AWS Local Zones are connected to a parent Region, allowing you to seamlessly connect to all
other AWS services via a secure, dedicated high-speed connection. AWS Local Zones are currently
available in a total of 33 metropolitan areas, with an additional 19 planned in the future. To use Local
Zones, you must first enable them within your AWS account. After that, all Local Zones will be listed
alongside the Availability Zones within that Region and can be selected when deploying everything
from VPC subnets, to EC2 instances and EBS volumes, to ECS and EKS clusters.

In August 2023, AWS announced Dedicated Local Zones, which offer dedicated, fully managed
infrastructure that is built for the exclusive use of a specific customer or community. Dedicated Local
Zones can be deployed in an existing on-premises data center or other locations that may be dictated
by a customer or community’s requirements to comply with security or other data sovereignty
regulations for mission-critical and other sensitive workloads. These are especially useful in the
public sector and other industries where strict governance controls are necessary to comply with
local laws and regulations.

Wavelength Zones

Much like AWS Local Zones, AWS Wavelength Zones also place core AWS services closer to large
end user bases and are connected to a parent Region via a secure, dedicated high-speed connection.
However, AWS Wavelength Zones are embedded within 5G mobile broadband networks and are
deployed within the data centers of large telecommunications providers. Deploying AWS resources
such as VPC subnets, EC2 instances, and EBS volumes to an AWS Wavelength Zone allows end users
to connect to these resources without ever leaving the mobile provider’s network. By reducing the
number of network hops and eliminating the need for any traffic to traverse the public internet,
developers can offer ultra-low latency and increased reliability for 5G applications such as live video
streaming and interactive gaming. AWS Wavelength Zones are currently available through Verizon in
the United States, KDDI in Japan, SK Telecom in South Korea, Vodafone in the UK and Germany, and
Bell in Canada.

Outposts

AWS Outposts brings the capabilities of the AWS cloud to your on-premises data center. This
includes the same hardware used by AWS within their data centers, allowing you to use native AWS
services, including the same tools and APIs you would use when running your infrastructure within
AWS. Outposts are available as 1U or 2U rack-mountable servers, or as entire 42U racks that can be
scaled to deployments of up to 96 racks. Outposts may be connected to AWS using either a Direct
Connect or VPN connection. Outposts allow you to run AWS services such as EC2, ECS, EKS, S3, RDS,
and EMR on-premises. Customers can also make use of PrivateLink gateway endpoints to securely
and privately connect to other services and resources, such as DynamoDB. There are a wide number
of EC2 instance types available on AWS Outposts. These include M5, C5, and R5 instances, as well as
storage options for EBS volumes, local disks, and local instance storage.
Because AWS Outposts are fully managed, you do not need to maintain a level of patch management
across your infrastructure or worry about installing or updating any software. AWS will ensure your
Outposts are patched and updated as needed.

AWS Global Infrastructure: Availability Zones, Regions and Edge Locations.

nyong godwill — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 22:56:24 +0000

Introduction:

Amazon Web Services is a global public cloud provider, and as such, it has to have a global network
of infrastructure to run and manage its many growing cloud services that support customers around
the world. In this post, we’ll take a look at the components that make up the AWS Global
Infrastructure.
The components are:
• Availability Zones (AZs)
• Regions
• Edge Locations
• Regional Edge Caches
• Local Zones
• Wavelength Zones
• Outposts

1. Availability Zones(AZs):

Availability Zones and Regions are closely related. AZs are essentially the physical data centers of
AWS. This is where the actual compute, storage, network, and database resources are hosted that we
as consumers provision within our Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). A common misconception is that a
single availability zone is equal to a single data center. This is not the case. In fact, it’s likely that
multiple data centers located close together form a single availability zone.
Each AZ will always have at least one other AZ that is geographically located within the same area,
usually a city, linked by highly resilient and very low latency private fiber-optic connections. However,
each AZ will be isolated from the others using separate power and network connectivity that
minimizes impact to other AZs should a single AZ fail.
These low latency links between AZs are used by many AWS services to replicate data for high
availability and resilience purposes. For example, when RDS (Relational Database Service) is
configured for ‘Multi-AZ’ deployments, AWS will use synchronous replication between its primary and
secondary database and asynchronous replication for any read replicas that have been created.

2. Regions:

A Region is a collection of availability zones that are geographically located close to
one another. This is generally indicated by AZs within the same city. AWS has deployed them across the
globe to allow its worldwide customer base to take advantage of low-latency connections. Every
Region will act independently of the others, and each will contain at least two Availability Zones.
For example, if an organization based in London were serving customers throughout Europe, there
would be no logical sense in deploying services in the Sydney Region simply due to the latency response.
Having global regions also allows for compliance with regulations, laws, and governance relating to
data storage (at rest and in transit). For example, you may be required to keep all data within a
specific location, such as Europe. Having multiple regions within this location allows an organization
to meet this requirement.

Region and Availability Zone Naming Conventions

AWS has a specific naming convention for both Regions and Availability Zones.
Depending on where you are viewing and using the Region name, it can be represented as two
different names for the same Region.
Regions have both a ‘friendly’ name, indicating a location that can be viewed within the Management
Console and a Code Name that is used when referencing regions programmatically, for example
when using the AWS CLI.

Edge Locations

Edge Locations are AWS sites deployed in major cities and highly populated areas across the globe.
They far outnumber the number of availability zones available.
While Edge Locations are not used to deploy your main infrastructures such as EC2 instances, EBS
storage, VPCs, or RDS resources like AZs, they are used by AWS services such as AWS CloudFront
and AWS Lambda@Edge (currently in Preview) to cache data and reduce latency for end-user access
by using the Edge Locations as a global Content Delivery Network (CDN).
As a result, Edge Locations are primarily used by end users who are accessing and using your
services.
For example, you may have your website hosted on EC2 instances and S3 (your origin) within the Ohio
region with a configured CloudFront distribution associated. When a user accesses your website
from Europe, they would be re-directed to their closest Edge Location (in Europe) where cached data
could be read on your website, significantly reducing latency.

The Well-Architected Framework AWS

nyong godwill — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 20:49:33 +0000

Overview

The Well-Architected Framework. The Well-Architected Framework is the document provided by AWS where best practices and lessons learned are documented for all customers to benefit from the collected know-how. It is organized around six pillars which focus on the ideas of Security, Reliability, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. There is a general overview document of all six pillars and a separate document focusing on each of these pillars individually.

The Goal

The goal of the Well-Architected Framework is to enable you to assess and improve your AWS architecture implementation by providing a catalog of questions around each of these pillars, where you can perform a discovery process and define fundamental issues that are often neglected in AWS implementations. The idea is to better understand the business impact of design decisions by evaluating your architecture using a consistent set of best practices.

The Framework

The framework is not about implementation details or architectural patterns, but it's a set of questions centered around helping you perform and understanding, and gain clarity in your architectural decisions. The AWS services involved and finally, the references to consult for details.

Definition

In a nutshell, the AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of questions developed by AWS Experts to help you evaluate your architecture and in general ask, how does my infrastructure follow best practices with regards to the following six general categories?

The categories are:

The Security pillar speaks to protecting your data and your systems.
The Performance Efficiency pillar speaks to using compute resources efficiently while minimizing over-provisioning as utilization fluctuates.
The Cost Optimization pillar speaks to eliminating unneeded expenses.
The Operational Excellence pillar speaks to running your workloads with enough automation and visibility to gain insights into day-to-day operations and be able to refine procedures.
The Sustainability pillar speaks to energy consumption and environmental impact by directly acting on reducing your resource utilization.
Lastly, the Reliability pillar speaks to dynamically acquiring compute resources to meet demand. This is done using fleets of EC2 instances configured in an auto-scaling configuration according to your definitions for increasing and decreasing the size of the fleet. Reliability also speaks to Recovery from infrastructure or service failures by implementing enough redundancy, backup, restore, and recovery procedures. It is important to mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations by using as much automation as possible.

Terminology from Software Development & Operations

nyong godwill — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 22:18:10 +0000

DevOps

. DevOps is a set of practices that intends to break down traditional silos between developers and operators of computer systems, allowing combined teams to collaborate and deliver software in a more consistent, efficient, and automated fashion

Enterprise Architecture

EA, groups are traditionally tasked with outlining the structure of the systems an enterprise will build and maintain to achieve its business goals. Like physical architects, they provide the blueprints for how the various systems should be put together, the "materials" or software concepts that should be used to build them, and how the end results should look.

Lift & Shift.

Lift & Shift is a method of migration involving moving an application that is currently architected and built from one environment (an on-premises data center) to another (usually a public cloud). Lift & Shift migrations can usually be done more quickly as they often do not require substantial changes to the application code or configuration.

Workload

is a generic name for an application or software system running on a computing or other platform.

On-Premises (or On-Prem)

is a term used to refer to company-owned or company-controlled data center space. Usually used to differentiate from public cloud environments where application migrations are targeting workloads.

Companies have an extensive On-premises infrastructure built over many years when they begin using the cloud, and there are often difficulties using systems, infrastructure or processes developed for the on-premises environment in the public cloud.

Rightsizing

is a form of optimization where measurements are taken over time to match workloads to a virtual resource sized to run it efficiently with a minimum of waste. Rightsizing can be used as a technique to save costs but must always involve technology oversight as well.

Agile

is a method of project management, used primarily for software development characterized by the division of tasks into short phases of work (into sprints) and frequent assessment of priorities and plans. Generally, leads to the development of products or software incrementally beginning with a minimum viable product and then continually enhancing it from a backlog of requirements.

General AWS Terminology

nyong godwill — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 21:44:24 +0000

Account (AWS)

AWS services are housed within an Account. Accounts can be Master Payer accounts that contain billing data or Linked Accounts which do not. AWS Organizations and other services can be used to manage Accounts within AWS. Many AWS services can span Account boundaries.

RI -Reserved Instance

A commitment to use a cloud resource, usually of a specific type, location, and size, for some period of time, usually 1 or 3 years, in exchange for a discounted rate.

SP

Savings Plans are very similar to Reserved Instances but more flexible and can only be applied to compute usage.

AURI, PURI, NURI / SP (SavingsPlans)

All Upfront Reserved instance, Partial Upfront Reserved Instance, and No Upfront Reserved Instance. Some people use these acronyms when referring to reserved instances, in case you hear them.

EC2

(AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud AWS' virtual computer cloud offering

AWS supports a variety of instances, Instance Type, Family, Generation, and Size (AWS) - Instance refers to a specific EC2 virtual machine. Instance Families, designated by letter, an instance Generation designated by a number and optionally other letters, and instance sizes that follow a structure of nano, micro, small, medium, large, xlarge, 2xlarge, etc. The Instance type includes the entire ndesignation, such as m5a.4xlarge which would be an "m" family, 5th generation, "a" for AMD chipset, and 4xlarge sized instance.

IAM

Identity and Access Management - is the way that AWS refers to their system of granting and governing permissions within their cloud platforms.

Console

Web-based portal from where you can manage your accounts or access AWS services.

Convertible / Standard

AWS terms refer to the ability to convert reserved instances for some resources to different specifications. Standard RIs cannot be converted or changed for their entire term. Convertibility reduces the discount offered by AWS.

Region

AWS has the concept of a Region, which is a physical location around the world where data centers are clustered. An AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate AZ's within a geographic area. Regions are generally guaranteed to be more than a minimum distance from one another to satisfy disaster recovery requirements.

Availability Zones

(AZ) are sub-units of a Region, there are typically multiple AZs per Region. AZs are made up of multiple physical data centers but can generally be thought of as being very closely situated from a network latency and performance perspective.

Unlocking the Cloud: Your Guide to AWS Essentials

nyong godwill — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 20:59:56 +0000

What is Cloud Computing?:

Introduction

The phrase 'cloud computing' has been used heavily within the IT industry for many years now and across many different sectors, such as retail and finance, and it's often referred to simply as the cloud. Now, cloud computing is a rapidly growing technology, and the adoption of this is a key strategy for many organizations and there's a very good reason for this. It changes the landscape of how many companies and organizations operate on a huge scale with significant business technical advantages and benefits that can't be ignored.

Definition

Cloud computing is a remote virtual pool of on-demand shared resources including computing, storage, network, and many more services that can be rapidly deployed at scale.

There may be a couple of terms within this definition that are new to you or not too clear, such as virtual or compute. Now, don't worry, I'm going to break these down:

Compute objects provide the brains to process your workloads, including what's required to process and run requests from applications and services. Compute resources in the cloud are comparable to these. Storage resources simply allow you to save your data across a shared environment. Any object that allows you to save your data in the cloud is classed as a storage resource.

Classic environment comparison, in a typical environment, these would be seen as your server hard disk or your network-attached storage, NAS, which is far-level shared storage accessed over the network, and your high-speed storage area network, your SAN, used for block-level shared storage. Network resources provide connectivity allowing all other resources, such as computing and storage, to communicate with each other. In a classic environment comparison, you would find hardware such as routers to route traffic between networks, switches that provide the backbone of your network connectivity allowing hosts to talk to one another, and firewalls to allow or deny traffic into the environment.

Cloud Deployment Models:

Typically within cloud computing, there are four different cloud model types, each offering different levels of management and security. These are public, private, hybrid, and community. Let's start with the public cloud.

A public cloud model is where the vendor makes available the use of shared infrastructure and resources that can be provisioned on-demand and typically accessed over the internet for public usage. The consumer will never see the hardware used, nor know the exact location of their data, but they will be able to specify the geographic location to aid with speed of performance, depending on where end users are located. It makes sense from a design perspective to host your infrastructure as close to the geographical region as your customers or end users are in order to reduce latency for your users.

A private cloud is different from a public cloud in that the infrastructure is privately hosted, managed, and owned by the individual company using it, giving greater and more direct control of its data. Enterprises who wish to keep a tighter grasp of security control may adopt this architecture. As a result, the hardware is usually held on-premises. How this differs from a typical on-premises server farm approach is that the same cloud principles are applied to the design, such as the use of virtualization, creating a pool of shared compute, storage, and network resources, making use of scalability and on-demand provisioning.

A hybrid cloud, as you may have already guessed, is a cloud model that makes use of both public and private clouds. This model may be used for seasonal burst traffic or disaster recovery. A hybrid model is established when a network link is configured between the private cloud to services within the public cloud, essentially extending the logical internal network. This takes the benefits given from both the public and private models and allows you to architect your services in the most appropriate model.

A community cloud is a type of Cloud computing service that several organizations share with similar needs and concerns, such as security, compliance, or specific regulatory requirements. It allows these organizations to collaborate and share resources while benefiting from cloud services' scalability and flexibility. Essentially, it combines the advantages of both public and private clouds, providing a shared infrastructure that is tailored to meet the specific needs of the community.

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DEV Community: nyong godwill

AWS Global Infrastructure: Regional Edge Caches, Local Zones, Wavelength Zones, And Outposts

Regional Edge Cache

Local Zones

Wavelength Zones

Outposts

AWS Global Infrastructure: Availability Zones, Regions and Edge Locations.

Introduction:

1. Availability Zones(AZs):

2. Regions:

Region and Availability Zone Naming Conventions

Edge Locations

The Well-Architected Framework AWS

Overview

The Goal

The Framework

Definition

Terminology from Software Development & Operations

DevOps

Enterprise Architecture

Lift & Shift.

Workload

On-Premises (or On-Prem)

Rightsizing

Agile

General AWS Terminology

Account (AWS)

RI -Reserved Instance

SP

AURI, PURI, NURI / SP (SavingsPlans)

EC2

IAM

Tags

Console

Convertible / Standard

Region

Availability Zones

Unlocking the Cloud: Your Guide to AWS Essentials

What is Cloud Computing?:

Introduction

Definition

Cloud Deployment Models: