AWS Regions, Availability Zones and Edge Locations

 

Introduction

Amazon Web Services is early adopter of the cloud.  AWS started in 2006 to provide scalable and flexible computing services to business and individuals.  Business no need to spend upfront infrastructure and developers can build the application in economy of scale, reliable and securely with AWS Infrastructure.  AWS has many services few of them global, most of them hosted in regions/zones based on the consumer of the hosted application to reduce latency to retrieve.  As part of this blog, we will see below topics.

·        AWS Regions

·        AWS Availability Zones

·        AWS Edge Locations

 

AWS Regions

What’s AWS Regions?  How it’s different from Availability Zones?  AWS Regions are physical location of AWS Infrastructure setup around the world.  The region consists of multiple availability zones. 

As we speak there are 31 regions as of this blog created, this region counts are increasing rapidly since the cloud adaption for Business increasing in fast manner.  Below picture from AWS Infrastructure, refer Global Infrastructure (amazon.com) for latest details.

If your application needs global presence, then you need to deploy your application in respective region to reduce the latency.  This depth and breadth of regions available by AWS helps Business achieve their demand.

To make sure that your application is highly available architected by deploying in different regions/availability zones, it’s responsibilities of individual customer who ever hosting their application in AWS.

                 To summarize, customer can choose AWS Regions based on below           factors.

• Latency – Based on their end user customers using their application.
• Cost – It’s vary based on geographic locations.
• Regulatory Requirement – To make sure the information stays within the restriction location to meet the compliance requirements for the business.

 

AWS Availability Zones

Availability Zones (AZ) are physically isolated locations within an AWS region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones.  This will help if there is disaster in one availability zone then resources in other availability zones will continue the business as usual and ensure high availability and resiliency of your application. Any new region created make sure AWS has two or more Availability zones in that region for high availability reasons.

Each availability zones connected with each other with low latency and high throughput networking.  High availability of availability zones is based on below factors.

• Redundant Power Supplies – Each Availability Zones (AZ) is equipped with multiple physical separate power source; this helps one fail and another one continues to provide the power source.
• Multiple Network connections – Here as well there are multiple network connections to handle the failure.
• Diverse Geographic locations – Each AZ located in certain distance to handle disaster scenario.
• Physical Security – Each data center protected with authorized entries.
• Automated monitoring – Capture the failure with automated software to recover by health check options.

 

AWS Edge Locations

To understand Edge Location first we need to understand what’s mean by cache.  Cache is temporary storage area for frequently used data.  Original data located in different region/availability zones.  Frequently accessed data stored as copy in cache to check first to retrieve the data before it reaches to original data location.   This reduces the latency and improve the performance.  If cache is temporary, how do we make sure the information available is latest?

• Time based expiration – Set the expiration time for the cache data so that after expiration it pick up the latest data fetched from original source to cache.
• Versioning – Add the version number to cache data, whenever the version number changed then we can get to know it need refresh data in cache.
• E-Tag/Last Modified Header - With this value user can determine whether source changed the value it required fresh in cache.
• Invalidation callbacks – Setup the call back when the source data is updated, this helps to invalidate the cache.

Regularly clear the cache to prevent the stale data from accumulating. 

Let’s look at Edge Nodes now, AWS Edge Nodes are located at the edge of the network and close to the end users of the application.  Edge nodes cache frequently accessed content to reduce the latency and improve the overall performance of the system. It’s important component of AWS Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, Amazon CloudFront.  It uses cache the content of applications, so that the content can be delivered to users faster and with lower latency.

Edge nodes are strategically placed in multiple locations around the world to ensure the users can access the content quickly and efficiently regardless of their application location hosted.  Since it’s using the cache, it reduces the load on the origin server as less traffic is required to be served directly from the origin.  It improves its reliability and availability.

AWS provide different services like CloudFront, Amazon S3, and Amazon Route 53 to manage edge nodes.  Using these services business can easily deploy and manage edge nodes and ensure their application can be delivered quickly and efficiently to users all over the world.

 

Conclusion

We have seen AWS Regions and Availability zones play major roles to deploy the application closer to end users to reduce latency.  Deploying in multiple location ensure the availability of the application.  Data stored in edge nodes to improve the performance by users and reduce the load of origin application server.

“P.S. If you read it till the end, Thank you!

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This article is part of AWS Career Growth Program (AWS-CGP) by Pravin Mishra

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