Ever wandered? How Regions, Zones, & Edge Locations Shape Our Cloud Experience (For example, have you ever wondered how the internet delivers your favorite movies and games so quickly? It is like magic, and different cloud vendors are the magicians working behind the scenes.)
Now you might say, What do you mean by region, zones, and edge locations? Well, before that, we have to understand what the AWS Global Infrastructure is!!
It's basically globally distributed hardware and data centers that are physically networked together to act as one large resource for the end customer.
The AWS Global Infrastructure is made up of the following resources:
- 32 Launched Regions
- 102 Availibility Zones
- 115 Direct Connection Locations
- 550+ Points of Presence
- 35 Local Zone
- 29 Wavelength Zone
Each AWS region is separate from the others. To put it another way, your data is never copied between regions without your express permission.
Choosing the Right AWS Region is one of the most important parts of AWS. Here's how we can choose the right region for us:
Consider four main aspects when deciding which AWS region to host your applications and workloads: latency, price, service availability, and compliance.
Latency: Choosing a region that is close to your user base will help us to prevent long wait times for the customers. Synchronous applications such as gaming, telephony, WebSockets, and IoT are significantly affected by higher latency, but even asynchronous workloads, such as e-commerce applications, can suffer from an impact on user connectivity.
Price: Prices may vary from one region to another. Internet connectivity, the cost of imported equipment, customs, real estate, and other factors can all have an impact on regional pricing.
Service accessibility: Not all services may be accessible in all regions. There is a table in the AWS documentation that lists the regions and the services that are offered in each,
Data compliance: Enterprise businesses frequently have to abide by laws requiring that client information be kept in a particular location. If appropriate, pick a region that satisfies your compliance needs.
2. Availability Zones: An Availability Zone is a separate datacenter with redundant power, networking, and connectivity within an AWS region. Typically, a region has three Availability Zones, but the US_EAST-1 region has 6 AZs (the most Availability Zones of any region).
These Zones are super close, just 50 to 100 kilometers away from each other.
AZs also have a code name. Since they’re located inside Regions, they can be addressed by adding a letter to the end of the Region code name. For example:
us-east-1a: an AZ in us-east-1 (Northern Virginia Region)
sa-east-1b: an AZ in sa-east-1 (São Paulo Region in South America)
Wrap Up
Depending on the service we use, we need to choose the right Region or AZ for your workload. In the next unit, we'll learn all the other aspects of AWS Global Infrastructure.
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