AWS Regions: just a cluster of data centers
How to choose an AWS Region? It depends:
- compliance
- proximity
- available services within region - some regions might not have the latest/newest services and features
- pricing
Availability Zones: each region has many availability zones
- each availability zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity -> why? so that they are isolated from disasters.
- they’re connected with high bandwidth, ultra-low latency networking and this connection is what forms an AWS Region
AWS Points of Presence (Edge Locations): physical locations around the world that cache and deliver content to end users with lower latency - they’re the infrastructure behind CloudFront (AWS’s CDN) and services like Lambda@Edge.
AWS has global services:
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Route 53 (DNS service) - DNS (Domain Name System) translates human-readable domain names (like amazon.com) into IP addresses that computers use to route traffic.
- CloudFront (Content Delivery Network)
- WAF (Web Application Firewall)
"Global" ≠ runs everywhere
“Global” means the service isn’t tied to a specific region, not that it runs inside every region. You don’t select a region when using IAM or Route 53 because they exist outside the region model entirely. Compare that to EC2 or Lambda, where resources in us-east-1 are completely separate from us-west-2.
Most AWS services are Region-scoped: example EC2 (Infra as a service), Elastic Beanstalk (platform as a service), Lambda (function as a service)