AWS Global Infrastructure
Tue, Jul 4, 2017Amazon web service is hosted their resources world wide, they provide facilities to place your resources and data in multiple locations to improve performance, high availability and cost optimization. In 2017 AWS Cloud operates 43 Availability Zones within 16 geographic Regions around the world, with announced plans for 11 more Availability Zones and four more Regions.
Amazon divide its global infrastructure in three major sections
Regions
AWS provides customers with the flexibility to place instances and store data within multiple geographic regions called Region. Each region is an independent collection of AWS resources in a defined geography.
- Each region is a separate geographic area and is completely independent
- Each Amazon region is designed to be completely isolated from the other regions & helps achieve the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability
- Communication between regions is across the public Internet and appropriate measures should be taken to protect the data using encryption
- Data transfer between regions is charged at the Internet data transfer rate for both the sending and the receiving instance
- Resources aren’t replicated across regions unless done explicitly
Selection of a Region can be driven from a lot of factors
- Latency – Regions can be selected to be closet to the targeted user base to reduce data latency
- Cost – AWS provides the same set of services across all regions, usually, however the cost would differ from region to region depending upon the cost (due to land, electricity, bandwidth etc) incurred by Amazon and hence can be cheaper in one region compared to the other
- Legal Compliance – Lot of the countries enforce compliance and regulatory requirements for data to reside within the region itself
- Features – As not all the regions provide all the AWS features and services, the region selection can depend on the Services supported by the region
Availability Zones
A Availability zones (AZ) is simply a Data center. Each region has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone is isolated, but the Availability Zones in a region are connected through low-latency links.
- Each Region will contain at a minimum of 2 availability zones.
- Each AZ is physically isolated from each other so that an uncommon disaster such as fire, earthquake would only affect a single AZ
- AZs in a region are connected with low-latency private links and not through public internet
- Multi-AZ, distribution of resources across multiple Availability Zones, feature can be used to distribute instances across multiple AZ to provide High Availability
Edge location
An edge location is basically content dilevery network end point used by the CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end user to reduce latency.
