Amazon Web Services (AWS) boasts the most extensive, secure, and reliable global infrastructure of any cloud provider.
AWS, with its 33 regions and 105 Availability Zones, ensures high availability and low latency regardless of your location. This massive network empowers businesses of all sizes to scale, perform, and secure their data efficiently.
AWS’s global infrastructure is not only about size but also about delivering top-notch performance, reliability, and flexibility for your applications. By leveraging regions and Availability Zones, you can ensure your services are fault-tolerant and highly available.
This article explores AWS Global Infrastructure, including its data centers and edge locations. Below, you’ll learn how the features translate into real benefits like speed, security, and scalability, making AWS a reliable choice for businesses worldwide.
The foundation of AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS Global Infrastructure forms the backbone of AWS Cloud. It consists of regions and Availability Zones, which are essential for providing reliable, secure, and high-performance cloud services, such as content delivery networks (CDN).
Image Source: AWS Global Infrastructure
Below, we’ll examine the core components of the AWS Global Infrastructure to help you understand how it delivers worldwide coverage.
Regions
Currently, there are 33 AWS Regions around the world, including, but not limited to — the United States, Canada, Europe, Brazil, India, and several throughout Asia. These geographic regions each contain a cluster of data centers (over 200 worldwide), enabling AWS customers to run applications close to their end-users, thereby reducing latency and improving response times.
Each region ensures data redundancy and network stability, which is crucial for businesses operating in different parts of the world. To better serve global customers, AWS has plans to launch six more Regions in the near future, including Malaysia, Mexico, and New Zealand.
Availability Zones
Availability Zones (AZs) are discrete, functionally independent data centers within a region. They have their own power, cooling, and networking to provide isolated failure protection. Each AWS Region includes at least three AZs, and each AZ is engineered to be independent yet interconnected with low latency. This setup ensures that if one data center fails, others can continue operating without interruption, helping customers achieve greater fault tolerance.
Some critical services, like AWS Load Balancers (useful for distributing global network traffic across servers), benefit significantly from this architecture. Using multiple AZs helps balance workloads and enhance the reliability of applications, even during unexpected outages, thus ensuring a seamless user experience.
Specialized zones for specific needs
AWS provides specialized zones that cater to different needs such as ultra-low latency and high-speed connectivity. These include Local Zones and Wavelength Zones, each designed to optimize performance and ensure seamless service availability for end users.
Local Zones
Local Zones are a great solution if you need low latency for your applications. They’re extensions of AWS Regions, strategically placed closer to large cities or metropolitan areas. With Local Zones, you can deploy services like compute, storage, and databases closer to your end users, reducing the distance data needs to travel.
Image Source: AWS Local Zones
These zones are especially useful for real-time gaming, live streaming, or any application where speed is crucial. For example, an online multiplayer game company might leverage Local Zones to provide players with faster, more reliable connections, enhancing the gaming experience significantly.
By strategically placing data centers in key locations, AWS ensures that Local Zones offer minimal latency and high performance. They’re beneficial for workloads that must remain near your on-premises resources, offering seamless integration and quick response times.
Wavelength Zones
Wavelength Zones are tailored for applications that need single-millisecond latencies and are often integrated with mobile devices. These zones combine AWS compute and storage services with 5G network capabilities, bringing the cloud closer to the cellular edge without ever leaving the telecommunications network.
This setup is beneficial for applications needing real-time updates or those reliant on high-speed data processing. Think about augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) experiences on mobile devices – AWS Wavelength Zones make these a seamless experience.
Service providers can deploy Wavelength Zones to enhance user experience by providing fast, reliable access to AWS services, no matter where the end user is located. This is transformative for industries like telemedicine, autonomous vehicles, and IoT devices, where every millisecond counts.
Optimizing performance and reach
Balancing global reach with local performance can be challenging — but AWS Global Infrastructure was designed to address this. Below, we’ll highlight some AWS solutions that are purpose-built to ensure your applications perform well, no matter where your end users are located.
Regional edge caches
Regional edge caches for CloudFront improve the performance of your content delivery by reducing latency. Positioned strategically between AWS edge locations and the origin servers, these caches are integral to the Amazon CloudFront network. They store content closer to end users, which reduces the load on your origin servers and speeds up content delivery.
When an end user requests data, CloudFront uses the nearest edge location, forwarding the request to a regional edge cache if needed. Thus, your content is quickly accessible, regardless of where your users are located — making these caches a game-changer for applications that require rapid content access with minimal delays.
Outposts
AWS Outposts extends AWS services to your own data center or on-premises environment, providing a seamless hybrid cloud solution. It offers the same compute, storage, and APIs as those found in an AWS Region. This service is ideal when you need to address low latency or local data processing needs that can’t be fulfilled by cloud regions alone.
Image Source: AWS Outposts Rack
With Outposts, you can run applications that require rapid response times closer to your users or operations. It supports a range of AWS services such as ECS, EKS, RDS, and EMR, providing the flexibility to run many types of tasks locally.
By integrating AWS infrastructure directly into your facility, Outposts ensures consistent performance and reliability, utilizing the same management tools and security features as the broader AWS ecosystem. It’s an effective solution for maintaining high performance while meeting specific local performance needs.
Benefits of AWS Global Infrastructure
While we’ve already discussed AWS’ ability to offer low latency and reliability to global businesses serving end users worldwide, the benefits extend even further. Below, we’ll examine AWS Global Infrastructure’s many benefits, including security, scalability, dependable disaster recovery solutions, and more.
Security
AWS puts security at the forefront of its services. The infrastructure features multiple layers of protection, including data encryption, firewalls, and physical security measures. This helps safeguard sensitive information and maintain data integrity, protecting not just AWS business users, but their customers as well.
AWS also offers various certifications and compliances like ISO 27001, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3, which ensure your data is handled according to international standards.
With dedicated tools like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), you control user access and secure APIs. This tight security framework makes AWS an attractive option for businesses concerned about data protection and security — particularly those in highly regulated industries.
Availability
The AWS Global Infrastructure is designed for high availability. It includes multiple Availability Zones in each Region, which are isolated from each other to avoid single points of failure. This architecture helps minimize downtime and ensures applications are consistently available.
AWS offers services like Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling to distribute incoming application traffic and ensure workloads are automatically adjusted to maintain performance and reliability. These features help create fault-tolerant applications that offer continuous service.
Performance
As mentioned above, AWS global infrastructure provides high-performance cloud computing resources with low latency and high throughput. The cloud infrastructure is connected by a 400 GbE fiber network, which allows for efficient data transfer and communication between Regions.
Through AWS services like EC2 and RDS, you can access powerful virtual machines and database services optimized for different use cases. Whether you need computing power for large-scale data processing or low-latency access for interactive applications, AWS delivers reliable global performance to meet your needs.
Scalability
Scalability is a key benefit of AWS global infrastructure, allowing you to easily adjust your resource allocation based on demand. With services like Elastic Beanstalk and EC2 Auto Scaling, you can scale your applications up or down automatically. This elasticity helps you manage costs effectively by using AWS resources only when needed and provides the flexibility to grow and adapt as your business expands.
Enhanced flexibility and innovation
AWS encourages innovation by providing a wide range of tools and services that support different workloads and applications. From machine learning to serverless computing, AWS offers technologies that help you stay ahead in your industry.
You can experiment with new ideas and develop applications without worrying about infrastructure constraints. This flexibility enables rapid development and deployment, making it easier to bring innovative solutions to market quickly.
Disaster recovery and data durability
Services like Amazon S3 offer built-in redundancy by storing data across multiple facilities and ensuring it’s backed up regularly. AWS also offers disaster recovery solutions like AWS Backup and AWS Disaster Recovery to keep your data safe and recoverable. These services provide automated backups, replication, and easy restoration processes, ensuring your business can quickly resume operations after an unexpected event.
Image Source: AWS Backup service
Compliance and governance
AWS supports various compliance certifications and adheres to international regulations and laws. It ensures that businesses meet their legal and regulatory requirements, giving you access to tools like AWS Artifact and AWS Config to help you manage compliance with ease. Whether you need GDPR, HIPAA, or FedRAMP compliance, AWS provides the resources to maintain governance and audit trails.
Global reach with local presence
AWS’s global footprint is marked by its extensive network of Regions and Availability Zones. These allow you to deploy applications close to your end users, reducing latency and improving user experience.
With a local presence in numerous geographic locations (and more in the works), AWS enables businesses to operate globally while complying with local laws and regulations. This geographic diversity also ensures redundancy and better disaster recovery capabilities, providing peace of mind for your data and applications.
Optimize your AWS investment with ProsperOps
AWS Global Infrastructure provides businesses worldwide with offerings to manage data, scale applications, and ensure consistent, high performance across a vast network of Regions and Availability Zones.
While managing AWS IT costs can be tricky for businesses leveraging this extensive infrastructure, a platform like ProsperOps can help.
ProsperOps is the leading automated FinOps platform for AWS, providing businesses with cloud savings-as-a-service. By actively managing your existing discount portfolio and dynamically adapting it to resource usage in real time, ProsperOps helps businesses maximize their cloud savings while minimizing risk.
ProsperOps deploys a combination of RIs and Savings plans that ensure optimal coverage and savings throughout an AWS environment, regardless of region or operating system, even offering savings for the GovCloud regions. We also offer Global Cyclical Optimization support.
While managing commitments manually can be time-consuming and risky, ProsperOps does it automatically, running 24/7 in the background to respond to real-time changes and optimize your discount instruments without missing a beat.
Ready to see how you can save more? Book a demo today to see ProsperOps in action!
