AWS Global Infrastructure

AWS offers a wide range of cloud computing services. Before learning the technical intricacies of any AWS service, understanding how these services are globally structured and arranged so that AWS can provide high availability and global resilience against failures is essential.

In this lesson, we’ll go into the specifics of AWS global infrastructure and understand the various terminologies related to it.

Why do we need AWS global infrastructure?

As a service provider, we would always want our customers to have low latency and a highly available user experience. The best hosting option to achieve this is to locate it physically close to our customers.

Suppose our customer base is spread across multiple physical locations throughout the world. In that case, it becomes essential to deliver a consistent user experience for each user, and setting up our own private data center globally comes with a lot of responsibilities and challenges. That’s where cloud service providers step to the rescue by offering a highly accessible, flexible, secure, and robust infrastructure under a pay-per-use pricing model, meaning we only pay for what we use.

For instance, the online entertainment provider Netflix maintains the delivery of its content all over the world using the AWS global infrastructure.

Components of AWS global infrastructure

The cloud services offered by AWS are hosted in physical data centers, which span across multiple geographical locations distributed worldwide to provide proximity to AWS customers.

AWS’s globally distributed infrastructure is divided into various Regions, Edge Locations, Availability Zones, and Local Zones.

An AWS Region represents a geographical area where AWS infrastructure is located across a number of data centers that are logically grouped into Availability Zones.

An Availability Zone (AZ) designates three or more data centers that are operational within an AWS Region and are backed by redundant connectivity, networking, and power.