Regions and AZs

Hierarchy

• AWS Regions
• AWS Availability Zones
• AWS Data Centers
• AWS Edge Locations / Points of Presence

Region

Region is a geographical area. Each region consist of 2 or more AZ. Regions are physical location(cities, or countries) e.g. London region.

What is availability zone

Availability zone is basically a data-centre. An availability zone might be a single or multiple data center. Data Centers in a region are connected with fiber optic in order to give low latency.

What is Edge Location

A smaller location that is used for caching with different strategies.

Edge Locations are endpoints for AWS which are used for caching content. Typically this consists of CloudFront, Amazon's Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Regional Edge Caches

Regional Edge Caches are used by CloudFront to offload your origin(host) by caching content that has been ejected from an edge location.

Region vs Availability Zone

• A region is a physical location in the world which consists of two or more Availability Zone
• An AZ is one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking and connectivity, housed in separate facilities.
• Edge locations are endpoints for was which are used for caching content. Typically this consist of CloudFront, Amazon Content Delivery Network

Scoped vs Global

🌍 Global (automatically worldwide)

• IAM.
• Route 53
• CloudFront
• WAF

🗺️ Region-Scoped (deploy to specific regions)

• EC2
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Lambda
• Rekognition

🔗 Region availability: aws.amazon.com/regional-services

Questions

• What are the factors to decide which AZ you should choose?
  • compliance with data governance and legal requirements. Data will never leave the region without your permission.
  • Proximity to customer: reduced latency
  • Availability of service
  • Pricing