🌍 AWS Global Infrastructure?
AWS has built a massive, secure, and globally distributed infrastructure to deliver cloud services with low latency, high availability, and fault tolerance.
✅ It consists of Regions, Availability Zones (AZs), Edge Locations, and more.
📦 Core Components
1. Region
- A geographic area (e.g.,
us-east-1,ap-south-1) - Each region contains 2 or more Availability Zones
- Data never leaves the region unless explicitly moved
🔹 Example: Asia Pacific (Mumbai) → ap-south-1
2. Availability Zone (AZ)
- A physically separate data center in a region
- Each AZ has independent power, networking, and cooling
- AZs are connected via low-latency private fiber
🔹 Example: ap-south-1a, ap-south-1b, ap-south-1c
3. Edge Location
- Used by CloudFront (CDN) to cache content closer to users
- Also used by Route 53, Global Accelerator, WAF, and Shield
🔹 600+ edge locations in 90+ cities globally
4. Local Zones
- Extend AWS services closer to users in metro cities
- Useful for low-latency apps like gaming, ML inference, AR/VR
🔹 Example: Los Angeles Local Zone, Delhi Local Zone
5. Wavelength Zones
- AWS infrastructure embedded inside telco data centers
- Designed for ultra-low latency 5G applications
🔹 Example: Verizon (USA), Airtel (India), Vodafone (UK)
6. AWS Outposts
- A fully managed on-premises rack that brings AWS services to your data center
- Ideal for hybrid cloud setups
🌐 Current Scale (as of 2025)
| Component | Count |
|---|---|
| AWS Regions | 33 (active) + more announced |
| Availability Zones | 105+ |
| Edge Locations | 600+ in over 90 cities worldwide |
| Local Zones | 35+ across major metro cities |
| Wavelength Zones | 15+ with global telecom providers |
🔐 Security & Resilience
- Data redundancy across AZs
- Support for multi-region failover
- Compliance certifications across regions (ISO, SOC, GDPR, HIPAA)
🧠 Why It Matters
| Benefit | How AWS Infra Helps |
|---|---|
| Low latency | Deploy in region close to users |
| High availability | Use Multi-AZ and Multi-Region architectures |
| Disaster recovery | Cross-region backup and failover |
| Compliance | Choose region to meet data residency laws |
✅ Summary
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Region | Geographical area (e.g., Asia, Europe) |
| Availability Zone | Isolated data center inside region |
| Edge Location | Caches content for faster delivery |
| Local Zone | City-level deployment zone |
| Wavelength Zone | 5G-specific edge infrastructure |
| Outposts | AWS services inside your data center |