AWS Regions and Availability Zones

AWS serves more than a million dynamic customers in more than 190 nations. AWS continues to grow worldwide to enable its clients to accomplish lower latency and higher performance, and to guarantee that client data lives only in the AWS region the client designates. AWS helps organizations build their initial infrastructures and continually provides the scalable infrastructure that meets clients’ requirements worldwide.

The AWS cloud infrastructure is connected globally and isolated as AWS regions and availability zones (AZs). An AWS region includes numerous AZs, each of which comprises one or more separate datacenters, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, and isolated in a separate location.

AZs provide the infrastructure that enables organizations to create enterprise applications and databases that are more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable than what is possible with single, on-premises customer datacenters. As of June 2020, the AWS cloud covers 76 AZs in 24 geographically separate regions around the globe, with more regions and zones planned on the horizon. Please refer to https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/?p=ngi&loc=0 for the latest information about regions and AZs.

Each Amazon region is totally separate from others. This accomplishes the best options for dependability and to reduce critical failure issues. Although every AZ is segregated, AZs within a region are associated through low-latency links. This enables AWS to provide the flexibility for organizations to create instances and store data inside different geographic regions as well as over numerous AZs within a particular AWS region. Each AWS AZs are designed to prevent independent failure, which reduces the potential risk of a single point of failure.

AWS Services

AWS offers a variety of global cloud-based products, that provide for compute, database, storage, networking, security, management tools, mobile, developer tools, analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT). Millions of customers, from large enterprises, to fast-growing startups, to leading government agencies, trust AWS to host their workloads and help them become more agile. AWS services help organizations to move to the cloud more quickly, at lower IT costs and scale.

AWS in Action

Let’s now jump into action to showcase the capabilities of AWS. You will be building similar architectures on AWS in later chapters, where I will help you with step-by-step instructions. For this example, assume you have an e-commerce website in a traditional datacenter.

Your company has decided to migrate to AWS without making any modifications to the web application and database. If this e-commerce application is moved to AWS as lift and shift without any changes, your AWS e-commerce infrastructure will look as follows:

• The traditional web server will be replaced by an AWS EC2 instance, and your traditional database will be replaced by Amazon RDS in an AWS AZ of your choice.

As your e-commerce website becomes more popular, you’ll need to scale your infrastructure to accommodate the increased flow of traffic from all over the world, 24 hours a day, without any interruption. If you were still using a traditional on-premises infrastructure, it would take weeks to months to scale up. But because you’ve migrated the infrastructure to AWS, scaling up will be simple: you’ll add a few more services manually via the AWS Management Console or use AWS CloudFormation to automate the infrastructure creation.

Now your e-commerce site has both dynamic content, such as products and price, and static content, such as images and videos. Separating the dynamic and static content will reduce the load and latency and improve performance by delivering the static contents from the AWS content delivery network, CloudFront. The workload will be shared by multiple smaller virtual machines behind an application load balancer. If one of the virtual machine fails, you’ll use Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to send the customer traffic to other running virtual machines, which improves reliability.

EC2 Auto Scaling will add a new instance to replace any failed instance and will add more instances automatically when traffic increases during a peak period. The RDS database instances will automatically failover to secondary instances if your primary database instance fails in a multi-AZ deployment. In addition, the Amazon RDS Read Replica will run all your read-only queries and reports. All of this can be configured and achieved in hours in AWS, versus weeks to months in a traditional datacenter environment.