Before talking about AWS infrastructure first we will see What is the cloud? What is AWS? There are many definitions, but the one that is most relevant to is the idea of an on-demand, pay-as-you-go, IT services that are delivered over the internet.
On-demand service: You don’t have to make any advanced contracts with AWS. The moment you need services like storage and compute or networking, they’re available immediately without any advanced contract.
Pay-as-you-go: You don’t have to have any prepaid tier, there’s no minimum requirement needed to be part of AWS.
Delivered over the internet: It is secure and available anywhere for you and your business. That’s what cloud is.
How AWS deploy our services regionally?
But first what is a Region? A Region is a geographically self-contained area where all of the resources you need for your application, all the compute, all the storage, are contained.
AWS has many Regions all over the world. For example, there are Regions in North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.
Now the question that will come to your mind is, which Region is the right Region for your business?
To answer this question you have to keep in mind about the following 4 factors:
- Latency: It is important to run your application near the region you selected. If speed to your customer is your number one priority, then certainly latency becomes a consideration.
- Cost: Not every Region is priced the same, because each different country has its own set of tax laws, their own financial situations, you’ll find the exact same services in different Regions may have different costs.
- Legal Restrictions: Legal restrictions may change the entire conversation altogether. Make sure you understand if the country you operate in has requirements that may dictate everything right away.
- Service Availability: AWS tries to roll every feature out to every Region, but sometimes a brand new feature gets released and it may take a few months to actually get into every Region around the globe. So, if you would like to try one of the brand new services, make sure you confirm which Region they’re operating in.
What region actually made of?
At AWS a region is a collection of 2 or more availability zones. Now we can consider an availability zone as if it was a standalone data center. Inside a region, AWS always has at least two availability zones separated by miles of distance, tens of miles of distance. And AWS does this specifically to protect you against data unavailability.
Also, you don’t have to worry about the distance between availability zones because AWS connects availability zones with a proprietary high-speed fiber network. You can run your application simultaneously across all of the availability zones.
The idea is it doesn’t matter what might happen to any of the two availability zones because your application runs in both of them at the same time. This is how you will not only be effective, be scalable, but also highly available all while running in a single region of your choice.
The AWS Cloud infrastructure is built around Regions and Availability Zones that we just saw.
For more information: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
I hope this blog gives you an understanding of AWS infrastructure.