Getting started with AWS part 3
AWS Regions
As we discussed earlier one of the drawbacks of using on-premises data centers is it's being centralized in one geographical location. Several issues came along with this
- If the data centers were subjected to any natural disaster
- All the backups were stored in the same building
- latency to retrieve data from a faraway place from the data center(even the speed of light may delay the data transmission between two distinct geographical locations)
- disaster recovery and data duplication costs will be high with your own infrastructure
But by using AWS infrastructure you are getting access to all areas throughout the globe
- you can have replications of your data centers where you getting the most traffic.
- In a natural disaster, you can replicate your data in two different regions
or in two different availability Zones(will be discussed soon).
There are several factors that you might need to consider when selecting the AWS region.
Compliance with data governance and legal requirements
If your company is located in a country with special data regulation rules, For example, if the data should not leave a specific geographical area as data of country ABC needs to remain inside ABC and cannot transfer to a data center located in country QPR.
Proximity to your customers
Select regions near to customers where you are getting the traffic most.
Available services within a Region
Sometimes your selected region would not have initiated your service requirements. You should have to reach a region that can satisfy all your AWS services needs.
Pricing
pricing can differ across different regions. Due to the tax policies and the infrastructure costs
By considering the above factors you should need to select the most suitable location to initiate your regions
Availability Zones
For a single region, there can have multiple availability zones. Availability zone stands for a data center located within a building
Although these availability zones lie to lower the latency rates those are distinct from miles to deal with the disasters. It is recommended to deploy your instances in at least two of these availability zones. So if one got caught up with a disaster service can be delivered continuously from the other.
Edge locations
what if you have customers all over the world. Is it needed to purchase and deploy your application around all the regions? What if your application is deployed in china and customers accessing data from Canada. data should travel a long way to reach the destination. To overcome this issue AWS has introduced a caching mechanism to replicate a cached copy of your data across different locations which are using the CDN Content delivery Network concept. these cached locations are called edge locations. Edge locations are separately situated from regions and you can push data from the regions to edge locations.
Amazon web service which is used to deliver content over the network such as videos, applications, data is called Amazon CloudFront.It owns its own version of DNS service as Amazon Route 53 which will redirect customers to the correct location to retrieve data.
Here are some links to explore more about amazon global infrastructure
