ASW Region and Availability Zone

Amazon Web Service Cloud  is located throughout the Globe. Their physical logical data center is located in North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. In this Article, we will talk about Regions, Availibitly zones and Local Zones as why they are important to know them before you start designing the cloud infrastructure.  After reading this blog post you should  be able to pick the right Region and Availibitly Zones for your company needs.

Regions: AWS has the concept of Regions which is a physical location around the global where the cluster of data center resides. Each Region consist of multiple isolated and physically separated Availibitly Zones within a geographical area. The multiple AZs design of every AWS Region offers advantages to customers. Each AZ has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra low latency network. 

Always, it is advisable to pick the AWS Region close to your location for low latency and compliance. AWS consoles are Region specific except IAM, SC and Router 53.  This also means not all Services are available to all Regions. AWS provides  more extensive global footprint than any other cloud provider, and to support footprint and ensure customers are served across the world, AWS opens new Regions rapidly. AWS maintains multiple geographic Regions, including Regions in all  North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle East.

Availability Zones: Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking and connectivity within AWS Regions. This provides customer the ability to operate production application and database that are more highly available, fault tolerant, scalable than would be possible from a single data center. These AZs within a Region are interconnected with high bandwidth, low-latency networking, over fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber providing high throughput . All traffics between AZs are encrypted and are physically located within 60 miles.

AWS Local Zones: Local Zones are a type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute, storage, database and other select services close to large populations, industry, and IT Centers. You can easily run applications that need single-digit milliseconds latency closer to end users in a specific geography. AWS Local Zones are ideal for use cases such as media and entertainment content creation, real-time gaming, live streaming, and machine learning.

 Local Zones are managed and supported by AWS, bringing you all of the elasticity, stability, and security benefits of the cloud. You can easily build and deploy latency-sensitive applications closer to your end users by using AWS services, scale up or scale down, and pay only the resources that you use, giving you a consistent AWS experience.

AWS Wavelength: AWS Wavelength is an AWS infrastructure offering optimized for mobile edge computing applications. Wavelength are AWS infrastructure deployments that embed AWS compute and storage services within communication service providers datacenters at the edge of the 5G network, so application traffics from 5G can devices can reach application servers running in Wavelength Zones without leaving the telecommunications networks. As of now, Wavelength are available on ten cities across the US with Verizon, in Tokyo, Japan with KDDI, and in Daejeon, South Korea with SKT.

AWS Outposts: AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS Services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or no-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads  that requires low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data latency, and migration of application with local system interdependencies.

Points to Consider while Selecting AWS Region.

1. Choose a Region close to your customer or location near you for low network latency.
2. Understand the requirement of your application before selecting Region.
3. Not all Services are available in all Regions.
4. The cost is differs Region to Region.
5.  The SLA is different for each Region.
6. The Compliance vary from Region to Region.

I hope this helps you decides Region of your need for low latency, security, compliance and pricing.