AWS Global Infrastructure
Tags: career, beginners, aws
Published: 2020-05-11 19:44:14

---
series: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Notes
title: AWS Global Infrastructure
published: true
description: An Overview of AWS's Global Infrastructure as you might find on the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. 
tags: #career #beginners #aws
---

## AWS Global Infrastructure

###Map Overview
![AWS Global Infrastructure Map](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/n7dvlx4qa6l8pozadq0m.png)
AWS has multiple data centers all over the world. 

This is so you, the customer, can access their services no matter where you are located around the globe. 

**Key points:**

AWS Serves over a million active customers in more than 190 countries

Currently there are:

- 61 Availability Zones (AZs)
- 22 Geographic Regions
- A vast network of Edge Locations

**Availability Zones:** are distinct locations within an AWS Region that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones.

**Geographic Regions:** a physical location around the world where AWS clusters data centers.

**Edge Locations:** where end users access services located at AWS.

### Regions

Region: a Geographically Distinct Location, which has multiple data centers. 

Availability Zones(AZs) = data centers.

![Map of AWS Regions and Availability Zones](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/jqhwah6duygqryt5z8sb.png)
**Key Points:** 

- Every region is physically isolated and independent of every other region in terms of location, power, and water supply.
- This isolation/independence helps with "fail over"
- If your servers go down in one locations or region you can count on other regions not being affected.
- When AWS launches a new services they typically launch it in US East first.
- When you are working with billing in AWS all that billing information appears in the U.S. East region
- It doesn't matter if you are utilizing resources in different regions, the billing will always end up in US East one.

You can head over to [AWS's Global Infrastructure](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/?p=ngi&loc=2) page to learn more about Regions and see maps of their locations.

### North American Regions:

**US East (Northern Virginia) Region:** 

- Availability Zones:
- 6 Launched 2006

**US East (Ohio) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2016

**US West (Oregon) Region** 

- Availability Zones: 4
- Launched 2011
- Local Zone: 1
- Launched 2019

**US West (Northern California) Region** 

- Availability Zones: 3
- *Launched 2009

**GovCloud (US-West) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2011

**GovCloud (US-East) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2018

**Canada (Central) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2016

### South American Regions

**South America (São Paulo) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3*
- Launched 2011

### Europe/Middle East/ Africa Regions

**Europe (Frankfurt) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2014

**Europe (London) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2016

**Europe (Paris) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2017

**Middle East (Bahrain) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2019

**Europe (Ireland) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2007

**Europe (Milan) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2020

**Europe (Stockholm) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2018

**AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2020

### Asia Pacific Regions

**Mainland China (Beijing) Region** 

- Availability Zones: 2

**Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region** 

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2012

**Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region**

- Availability Zones: 4
- *Launched 2011

**Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2016

**Mainland China (Ningxia) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3

**Asia Pacific (Osaka) Local Region1**

- Availability Zones: 1
- Launched 2018

**Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2016

**Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region**

- Availability Zones: 3
- Launched 2019

To view what services are available in each Region you can check out AWS's [Region Table](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/)

### Availability Zones

Availability Zones are often referred to as AZs. 

An AZ is a data center owned and operated by AWS in which their service is run.

The use of AZ’s give customers the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more:

- highly available
- fault tolerant
- scalable

**Key Points:**

- Data Centers always run more than one AZ.
- This allows users to practice high availability. Customers who care about the availability and performance of their applications want to deploy these applications across multi AZ's in the same region.
- There are specific AWS services that require the use of more than one AZ to function properly.
- Multi AZ- refers to distributing your instances across multiple availability zones so that they fail over.
- The latency between AZs in a Region is extremely low. On average it is below 10 milliseconds.

### Edge Locations

**Key Points:**

- Edge locations allow users to send data and receive data from AWS faster.
- An Edge Location is a data centre owned by a trusted partner of AWS
- They have a direct connection to the AWS network.
- These data centers are not used for computing or storage.
- It's a faster way to connect to AWS where AWS may not have a data centre yet.
- Services that would utilize Edge Locations would be:
    - Cloud-Front- a CDN
    - Route53- for DNS
    - A.P.I. Gateway- a way of connecting your Lambda functions with an end point
    - S3 - where you want to get your files uploaded to S3 a lot faster.
- Allows for low latency

Edge Cases typically outnumber Availability Zones(AZ). 

If you check out the [Regions and AZs](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/?p=ngi&loc=2) map again you can see the Edge Locations represented as blue dots.

### GovCloud
![Address security and compliance requirements](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/33bwh8gof6g28g5i68op.png)

**Key Points:**

- AWS GovCloud Regions allow customers to host sensitive **Controlled Unclassified Information** and other types of regulated workloads.
- GovCloud Regions are only operate by employees who are U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
- Only accessible to U.S. entities and account state holders who pass a screening process.
- Customers can architect secure cloud solutions that comply with:
    - Fed**RAMP** High baseline
    - DOJ's Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Security Policy
    - U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (TAR)
    - Export Administration Regulations (EAR)
    - Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide

    GovCloud Regions are currently only in the US. 

    You can view their regions on [AWS Map of Regions and Edge Networks.](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/?p=ngi&loc=2)

    You can view more about GovCloud on the official [AWS GovCloud page.](https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/?whats-new-ess.sort-by=item.additionalFields.postDateTime&whats-new-ess.sort-order=desc)