How is AWS built?
AWS is AWS is built on a global infrastructure designed for high availability and low latency.
The infrastructure is built on top of the following components:
Regions
Regions are physical locations worldwide, each containing multiple Availability Zones (AZs).
How many AZs is a region composed by?
A region is composed by at least three Availability Zones (AZs).
Note: Not all AWS services are available on every region.
Availability Zones (AZs)
AZs are isolated data centers within a region that allow fault-tolerant architectures.
How many data centers is an availability composed by?
An availability zone is composed by at least one data center.
Edge Locations (Points of Presence)
Points of Presence used by CloudFront to cache content closer to users.
Local Zones
Local Zones are extensions on a region that place AWS services physically closer to large population centers of to a specific location.
CloudFront (CDN)
CloudFront is AWS’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.
It delivers content globally with low latency by caching copies of web content (such as websites, videos, APIs, etc.), at edge locations close to users.
Route 53 (DNS)
Route 53 is Amazon’s scalable DNS web service.
Routing Policies
Route 53 has four main routing policies:
Simple Routing
- Returns a single resource IP address for a DNS query;
- Use case: When there is only a single resource to route traffic to, with no special routing logic.
Weighted Routing
- Distributes traffic across multiple resources according to assigned weights (percentages);
- Use case: For load balancing, testing new versions or gradually shifting traffic between endpoints.
Latency Routing
- Routes traffic to the resource that provides the lowest latency (fastest response time) for the user’s location;
- Use case: Improve user experience by directing them to the closest or fastest AWS region.
Failover Routing
- Provides active-passive failover. Traffic is routed to the primary resource unless it’s unhealthy, then it fails over to a secondary resource.
- Use case: High availability and disaster recovery.
AWS Global Accelerator
The AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service designed to improve availability & performance of applications for global users.
It leverages the AWS internal network to optimize the route to an application. (~60% improvement).
