AWS Regions and Availability Zones Overview

AWS Infrastructure

• AWS data centers house hardware components such as servers, storage, and network equipment with redundant power, connectivity, cooling, and security controls.
• 16 AWS Regions and AZs provide customers with highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable solutions.
• AZs within a Region are connected over high-bandwidth, low-latency private metro-fiber links, enabling synchronous replication between AZs.
• If there is an outage at one AZ, customers can continue to serve from replica workloads running in other AZs.

AWS Local Zones

• AWS Local Zones are infrastructure deployments that place compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services close to large population and industry centers.
• Local Zones allow customers to use select AWS services closer to end-users, providing low-latency access to applications running locally.

AWS Wavelength Zones

• AWS Wavelength Zones embed AWS compute and storage services within 5G networks, providing mobile edge computing infrastructure for developing, deploying, and scaling ultra-low-latency applications.
• Customers can run components that need ultra-low latency in Wavelength Zones.
• There are 30 AWS Wavelength Zones across the globe.

AWS Edge Locations

• Edge Locations are primarily used for caching data content to provide a better user experience with low latency.
• Edge Locations are used by CloudFront and other AWS services.
• There are many Points of Presence (PoPs) in AWS global infrastructure.

AWS Security and Compliance

• Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority.
• AWS IT infrastructure is designed and managed in alignment with best security practices and a variety of IT security standards.

AWS Regions and AZs

• AWS has multiple Regions and AZs to provide customers with infrastructure resources closer to their end-users, reducing network latency and improving user experience.
• Having multiple Regions and AZs helps to:
  • Identify infrastructure resources closer to end-users
  • Adhere to data sovereignty and compliance regulations
  • Isolate groups of resources for failover and disaster recovery scenarios

AWS Global Infrastructure

• AWS has a global infrastructure in North America, South America, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Asia Pacific, and Australia/NZ.
• The AWS Global Infrastructure comprises multiple data centers that house all servers, storage devices, and networking equipment across different geographical regions.

Cloud Service Models

• Specialized cloud service models include:
  • Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS)
  • Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS)
  • Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)
  • XaaS (Anything as a Service)
• Each cloud service model provides different levels of control and functionality to cloud consumers.

SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS

• SaaS (Software as a Service) allows users to access software applications over the internet, without managing underlying IT resources.
• PaaS (Platform as a Service) provides a pre-defined environment with pre-packaged products and tools, sparing cloud consumers from administrative burden.
• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provides virtualized infrastructure-related IT resources, giving cloud consumers full administrative control.