Cloud Based Technologies

ITCFA1-33

Week 2
 Learning Outcome

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• Describe the AWS Global Infrastructure

 AWS Global Infrastructure

The demand for scalable, reliable, and secure cloud services has never been higher in today’s digital
landscape. AWS Global Infrastructure is a beacon of innovation in this domain, offering a vast network of
data centres strategically positioned worldwide. With components like Regions, Availability Zones, Local
Zones, Edge Locations, Regional Edge Caches, and Wavelength Zones, AWS provides a robust ecosystem
to meet the diverse needs of businesses and organisations.

The AWS infrastructure is built around Regions and Availability Zones (AZs).

An AWS Region is a physical location in the world where AWS have multiple AZs.

AZs consist of one or more discrete data centres, each with redundant power, networking, and
connectivity, housed in separate facilities. Each region is completely independent. Each Availability Zone
is isolated, but the Availability Zones in a region are connected through low-latency links. AWS are
constantly expanding around the world, and currently there are:
AWS Global Infrastructure
 What is AWS Global Infrastructure?

• The AWS Global Infrastructure is a vast network of data centres and resources strategically
located worldwide to provide cloud services.

• The infrastructure comprises multiple interconnected components, such as Regions,

Availability Zones, Local Zones, and Wavelength Zones.

• AWS Global Infrastructure’s main component is data centres called Availability Zones (AZ).
AZs are isolated locations within AWS Regions. The AWS Global Infrastructure Map includes
102 Availability Zones spread across 32 geographic regions globally.

• Moreover, plans are underway to expand with an additional 12 Availability Zones and 4
more AWS Regions, covering countries like Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?

The AWS Global Infrastructure represents a highly distributed and robust ecosystem of data centres,
ensuring global coverage, reliability, and performance for a wide array of cloud-based services and
applications. Here are the 6 components of AWS Global Infrastructure:

• Regions
• Availability Zones (AZs)
• Local Zones
• Edge Locations
• AWS Regional Edge Caches
• Wavelength Zones
What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
1. AWS Regions
• An AWS Region is a distinct geographical area worldwide where a collection of data centres is
clustered. This model incorporates multiple Availability Zones and physically and logically separates
logical data centre groups. Each AWS Region comprises at least three Availability Zones, ensuring
geographic redundancy and high availability.

• AWS Regions and Availability Zones are not the same. AWS Regions are the larger geographical areas
where data centres are located, while Availability Zones are subsets within those regions. We will
discuss AZs intensely in the next part.

• AWS operates in several geographic regions, including North America, South America, Europe, China,
Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle East.

• Each region consists of 3 or more availability zones.

• Each Amazon Region is designed to be completely isolated from the other Amazon Regions.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
You can replicate data within a region and between regions using private or public Internet connections.

You retain complete control and ownership over the region in which your data is physically located,
making it easy to meet regional compliance and data residency requirements.

Note that there is a charge for data transfer between regions.

When you launch an EC2 instance, you must select an AMI that’s in the same region. If the AMI is in
another region, you can copy the AMI to the region you’re using.

AWS Availability Zones

 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
Regions and Endpoints:

• When you work with an instance using the command line interface or API actions, you must specify its
regional endpoint.

• To reduce data latency in your applications, most Amazon Web Services offer a regional endpoint to
make your requests.

• An endpoint is a URL that is the entry point for a web service.

• For example, [Link] is an entry point for the Amazon
DynamoDB service
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
2. AWS Availability Zones
• People often refer to Availability Zones (AZs) in AWS as data centre facilities. Each Availability Zone is a
physically separated data centre with power and infrastructure. AWS has strategically designed these
Availability Zones to provide redundancy and resiliency for applications and services.

• AWS Availability Zones have their own power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. Deploying
resources across multiple Availability Zones ensures that if one AZ experiences issues or downtime, it
enables the others to continue operating, thereby enhancing the overall resilience of applications
hosted on the AWS platform.

• Availability Zones are physically separate and isolated from each other.
• AZs span one or more data centres and have direct, low-latency, high-throughput, and redundant
network connections between each other.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
• Each AZ is designed as an independent failure zone.
• When you launch an instance, you can select an Availability Zone or let AWS choose one for you.
• If you distribute your EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones and one instance fails, you can
design your application so that an instance in another Availability Zone can handle requests.

• You can also use Elastic IP addresses to mask the failure of an instance in one Availability Zone by
rapidly remapping the address to an instance in another Availability Zone.

• An Availability Zone is represented by a region code followed by a letter identifier; for example, us-
east-1a.

• To ensure that resources are distributed across the Availability Zones for a region, AWS independently
map Availability Zones to names for each AWS account.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
• For example, the Availability Zone us-east-1a for your AWS account might not be the same location as
us-east-1a for another AWS account.

• To coordinate Availability Zones across accounts, you must use the AZ ID, which is a unique and
consistent identifier for an Availability Zone.

• AZs are physically separated within a typical metropolitan region and are in lower-risk floodplains.
• AZs use discrete UPS and onsite backup generation facilities and are fed via different grids from
independent facilities.

• AZs are all redundantly connected to multiple tier-1 transit providers.

What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?

3. AWS data centre locations

Here is the complete list of AWS data centre locations in all regions:

• Europe / Middle East / Africa

11 Geographic Regions
33 Availability Zones
39 Edge Network locations
2 Regional Edge Cache locations
Availability Zones: Bahrain (3), Cape Town (3), Frankfurt (3), Ireland (3), London (3), Milan (3), Paris
(3), Spain (3), Stockholm (3), Zurich (3), and UAE (3)
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?

• North America 1 Geographic Regions

7 Geographic Regions 3 Availability Zones (in São Paulo)
25 Availability Zones 4 Edge Network locations
44 Edge Network locations 1 Regional Edge Cache locations
2 Regional Edge Cache locations Asia Pacific and China
Availability Zones: N. Virginia (6), Ohio (3), N. 12 Geographic Regions
California (3), Oregon (4), US-East (3), US-West
38 Availability Zones
(3), Central (3)
34 Edge Network locations
• South America
5 Regional Edge Cache locations
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
4. AWS Local Zones
AWS Local Zones are a part of the AWS Global infrastructure that brings cloud services locally to specific
areas with a high concentration of users and applications. These Local Zones are a subset of AWS
Availability Zones near specific metropolitan areas.

Local Zones allow customers to deploy applications that require low latency to end-users or specific
resources in those geographic areas. They are handy for applications that require real-time processing,
such as gaming, interactive multimedia, and financial services, where reducing latency is critical for a
seamless user experience.

AWS Local Zones place compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services closer to end-users.

With AWS Local Zones, you can easily run highly demanding applications that require single-digit
millisecond latencies to your end-users.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
Each AWS Local Zone location is an extension of an AWS Region where you can run your latency-
sensitive applications using AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Virtual
Private Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon File Storage, and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing in
geographic proximity to end-users.

AWS Local Zones provide a high-bandwidth, secure connection between local workloads and those
running in the AWS Region, allowing you to seamlessly connect to the full range of in-region services
through the same APIs and tool sets.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
5. AWS Edge Locations
AWS Edge Locations are endpoints for Amazon Web Services’ CloudFront service. They are strategically
distributed data centres situated in various areas around the world. These Edge Locations act as caching
servers that store copies of frequently accessed content, such as images, videos, web pages, and other
static files, closer to the end users.

The Edge Location closest to the client receives requests for content distributed via CloudFront. This
reduces latency and improves the overall performance of the application or website if the content
already exists at that Edge Location. If the content still needs to be cached, the Edge Location retrieves
it from the origin server (such as an Amazon S3 bucket or a custom origin) and caches it for subsequent
requests.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
• AWS Regional Edge Caches
• Like edge locations, Regional Edge Caches are CloudFront service sites strategically placed worldwide
near your viewers. They deliver content directly to viewers between your origin server and global edge
locations.

• Regional edge caches assist with many sorts of material, especially content that becomes less popular
over time. Examples are user-generated material, e-commerce assets, news, and other content that
may rapidly gain popularity.

• There are many more edge locations than regions.

• Currently, there are over 200 edge locations.
• Regional Edge Caches sit between your CloudFront Origin servers and the Edge Locations.
• A Regional Edge Cache has a larger cache width than each of the individual Edge Locations.
What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
6. Wavelength Zones
AWS Wavelength is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) service that brings cloud services to the edge of 5G
networks. It supports real-time gaming, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), video streaming,
and other applications that require ultra-low latency and high bandwidth connectivity.

A Wavelength Zone is a specialised infrastructure deployment within a data centre run by a

telecommunications provider.

These zones are strategically placed near 5G base stations, directly connecting the AWS resources and
the 5G network. The proximity minimises latency for applications requiring instant responses.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
• AWS Wavelength enables developers to build applications that deliver single-digit millisecond latencies
to mobile devices and end-users.

• AWS developers can deploy their applications to Wavelength Zones, AWS infrastructure deployments
that embed AWS compute and storage services within the telecommunications providers’ datacenters
at the edge of the 5G networks, and seamlessly access the breadth of AWS services in the region.

• AWS Wavelength brings AWS services to the edge of the 5G network, minimising the latency to
connect to an application from a mobile device.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
7. AWS Outposts
AWS Outposts bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data
centre, co-location space, or on-premises facility.

You can use the same AWS APIs, tools, and infrastructure across on-premises and the AWS cloud to
deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience.

AWS Outposts is designed for connected environments and can be used to support workloads that need
to remain on-premises due to low latency or local data processing needs.

AWS Outposts brings the capabilities of the AWS cloud to your on-premises data centre. This includes the
same hardware used by AWS within their data centres, allowing you to use native AWS services,
including the same tools and APIs you would use when running your infrastructure within AWS.
 What are the Key Components of AWS Global
Infrastructure?
Outposts are available as 1U or 2U rack-mountable servers, or as entire 42U racks that can be scaled to
deployments of up to 96 racks. Outposts may be connected to AWS using either a Direct Connect or VPN
connection. Outposts allow you to run AWS services such as EC2, ECS, EKS, S3, RDS, and EMR on-
premises.

Customers can also make use of PrivateLink gateway endpoints to securely and privately connect to
other services and resources, such as DynamoDB. There are a wide number of EC2 instance types
available on AWS Outposts. These include M5, C5, and R5 instances, as well as storage options for EBS
volumes, local disks, and local instance storage.

Because AWS Outposts are fully managed, you do not need to maintain a level of patch management
across your infrastructure or worry about installing or updating any software. AWS will ensure your
Outposts are patched and updated as needed.
 What are the 6 benefits of AWS Global Infrastructure?

• The AWS Global Infrastructure offers 6 key benefits to businesses and organisations that leverage its
services, as mentioned on the AWS website: security, availability, performance, scalability, flexibility,
and global footprint.
 What are the 6 benefits of AWS Global Infrastructure?

• Security: AWS offers robust security measures, including encryption and constant monitoring. You
maintain control over your data with encryption, movement, and retention options.

• Availability: AWS ensures the utmost network availability among cloud providers. Each region is isolated
and divided into multiple Availability Zones (AZs). If one AZ experiences an issue, other AZs can continue
to operate without interruption.

• Performance: Low latency, minimal packet loss, and high network quality are all characteristics of AWS
Global Infrastructure.

• Scalability: AWS enables flexible scaling of resources, eliminating over-provisioning. You can instantly
adjust resources based on business needs, rapidly deploying hundreds or thousands of servers.

• Flexibility: You can choose how and where to run workloads, utilising the same network, control plane,
APIs, and services. Options include global AWS Regions, AWS Local Zones, AWS Wavelength for low
latency, and AWS Outposts for on-premises deployment.
 What are Essential AWS Certifications and Courses to
Learn AWS Global Infrastructure?

To become proficient in understanding and working with AWS Global Infrastructure, you can pursue specific
AWS certifications and courses that cover relevant concepts, technologies, and best practices. Here are the
top 3 essential AWS certifications and courses that can help you learn about AWS Global Infrastructure:

AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification

• The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification provides a solid overview of AWS services, pricing
models, architecture, security, and the overall benefits of cloud computing. This certification is ideal for
beginners who are new to cloud technology and want to grasp the fundamental concepts, services, and
benefits of cloud computing.

• The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification is a great starting point for anyone looking to build a
foundational understanding of Amazon Web Services and cloud computing concepts. It does not dive into
the technical details of specific AWS services.
 What are Essential AWS Certifications and Courses to
Learn AWS Global Infrastructure?

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate certification covers a broad range of AWS services and
architectural best practices, including designing and deploying applications on a global scale using multiple
regions and Availability Zones.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate certification is ideal for individuals who want to showcase
their expertise in architecting solutions using AWS services, including global infrastructure-related ones.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional certification is an advanced-level certification offered
by Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS Cloud professionals with extensive experience and expertise in
designing and deploying complex applications are ideal candidates for this program.

Building on the associate-level certification, AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional certification
goes deeper into advanced architectural concepts, including designing highly available and fault-tolerant
 Support plans

AWS Support offers four support plans:

• Basic Support – Resource Centre access, Service Health Dashboard, product FAQs, discussion forums,
and support for health checks

• Developer Support: Support for early development on AWS

• Business Support: Customers that run production workloads

• Enterprise Support: Customers that run business and mission-critical workloads

QUESTIONS?