AWS Infrastructure

AWS Infrastructure entails to how AWS is setup for use by millions around the globe.

AWS stores all of it's resources regionally to facilitate businesses and users located in different parts of the world.

Region

A region is a geographically self-contained area where all of the resources(compute, storage, etc.) you need for your application are contained.

It could be a country or a continent bounded by it's own set of laws and procedures. And ofcourse, you need to choose the region that likely favor your needs.

Few things that you need to consider before choosing a region are:

1. Latency : Users experience the application with greater speed if they are closer to a region. Analyze where most of your users are from and then choose a region closest to them. Speed does matter and think about latency if it is your first priority.
2. Cost : Due to the fact that every country(that bound a region) has it's own set of tax laws or financial regulations, not every region is priced the same.
3. Compliance : Legal restrictions like that of United States HIPAA requirements or European GDPR requirements can sometimes outweigh any other consideration. Make sure to understand if the country you operate in has requirements that may dictate everything the right way.
4. Service availability : Not every new feature or service is available at all regions simultaneously, so make you know in which region it is operating in.

So, what are regions actually made of? Where are all the resources located in these regions? Here is the answer...

Availability Zones

Think of a Region as a collection of Availability Zones. An availability zone(AZ) consists of two more standalone data centers.

They are separated with miles of distance from each other to prevent any natural disaster or unprecedented breach that could bring one down. In fact, all the availability zones in a region are inter-connected with high speed fiber network and when one goes down, the other takes backup and starts running as normal. You may infer this as your application is being run on multiple AZs simultaneously.

Now that's something relaxing...

Extras

Local Zones : They are a new type infrastructure deployment closer to large populated areas, industry and IT centers. With local zones you can run applications with high priority of latency such as live video & game streaming, electronic automations and machine-learning models.

Points of Presence : These locations consists of Edge Locations and Regional Edge Cache Servers.

Check out this page for interesting visualization on AWS infrastructure.

Thank you!❤️