AWS Infrastructure: Regions, Availability Zones, and Data Centers

Before we move on to the components of networking on AWS, let’s take a quick look at the global AWS infrastructure.

As we can see in the screenshot above, as of January 2022, AWS is present in 26 regions and 84 availability zones. Additionally, it has 14 local zones, 20 wavelength zones, and more than 310 points of presence.

But why does AWS need to operate in so many different locations? Wouldn’t it be easier to just operate a few data centers on each continent and be done with it?

The answer to this is latency. AWS operates all these different types of infrastructure to offer the smallest possible latency, no matter where we (or our customers) are around the world.

Let’s take a look ...