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AWS Global Infrastructure

4 min read Quiz at the end

Understand AWS Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations — the foundation of designing resilient global systems.

AWS Global Infrastructure

AWS is a GLOBAL cloud. Understanding WHERE your resources live is critical for designing systems that are fast for users worldwide and survive data center failures.

Teacher Note: Think of AWS like a global chain of warehouses. Regions are countries where warehouses exist. Availability Zones are separate buildings in each country. Edge Locations are small delivery depots near your customers.

Regions

A Region is a geographic area containing AWS data centers — for example us-east-1 (North Virginia), eu-west-1 (Ireland), ap-southeast-1 (Singapore). Choose a region based on:

Compliance — GDPR requires EU data to stay in Europe
Latency — choose the region closest to your users
Service availability — new services launch in us-east-1 first
Cost — us-east-1 is typically 10-20% cheaper than other regions

Availability Zones (AZs)

Each Region has 3-6 Availability Zones. Each AZ is one or more separate data centers with independent power, cooling, and networking. If one AZ catches fire, the others keep running.

Region: us-east-1 (North Virginia)
  AZ: us-east-1a  <-- separate building
  AZ: us-east-1b  <-- separate building
  AZ: us-east-1c  <-- separate building

Always deploy across at least 2 AZs for high availability!

Edge Locations

400+ global locations used by CloudFront CDN and Route 53 DNS. They cache content close to users so a student in Mumbai gets fast responses from a server hosted in the US.

Component	Count	Purpose
Regions	33+	Full AWS services available
Availability Zones	105+	Fault-isolated data centers within a Region
Edge Locations	400+	CloudFront CDN and Route 53 DNS caching

Exam Tip: Multi-AZ = High Availability within one Region. Multi-Region = Disaster Recovery across Regions. The exam tests whether you know which to use.

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Topic Quiz · 2 questions

Test your understanding before moving on

1. What is the purpose of Availability Zones within an AWS Region?

💡 AZs are physically separate data centers within a Region — if one fails, the others continue running.

2. Which criteria is MOST important when selecting an AWS Region for a European healthcare company?

💡 Data residency regulations like GDPR require EU patient data to stay within European regions.

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AWS Global Infrastructure