AWS Global Infrastructure 101 — definition, components, and benefits

As the world’s leading cloud provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS) operates a vast network of data centers strategically deployed across multiple geographic regions. This extensive system, known as the AWS Global Infrastructure, ensures users can access the AWS services they need, anytime and anywhere.

In this article, we’ll explore the AWS Global Infrastructure in detail. We’ll explain what it is, how it works, and what its key components are to show you what makes it the foundation of today’s most advanced cloud ecosystem.

What is AWS Global Infrastructure?

The AWS Global Infrastructure is the backbone of AWS’s cloud services, comprising hundreds of strategically located data centers worldwide. It’s an intricate network of interconnected points that work together seamlessly to provide high-quality cloud computing services across every continent, region, and city.

The AWS Global Infrastructure supports services used by millions of users and tens of thousands of global partners, making it the largest continuously growing cloud ecosystem on the planet.

What are the main components of the AWS Global Infrastructure?

To better understand the AWS Global Infrastructure, let’s dig deeper into its two key components:

1. Regions

2. Availability Zones (AZs)

AWS Regions are geographical areas that contain multiple physical data centers known as Availability Zones (AZs). Each AZ usually includes multiple data centers working together to achieve a few important goals: 

• Boosting redundancy: Your data is stored in different locations for better protection 

• Improving availability: AWS services stay up and running, even if something goes wrong

• Reducing latency: Data loads faster, with less waiting time

Each AZ is autonomous in the sense that it uses separate power, networking, and connectivity systems to avoid affecting other AZs in case of an issue. 

But AZs are also connected in a way—every AZ is linked to at least one other AZ in the same Region through reliable and fast fiber-optic connections. Think of these connections as ultra-fast data highways that let data sync up in real time across multiple AZs. So, whenever you make a change to the original data, it’s instantly reflected in its copies through a process called data replication.

With data replication, you maintain up-to-date data copies in case of a disaster, like a database malfunction or a server crash. This is the emergency plan you need to have in place to prevent data loss.

List of AWS Regions and Availability Zones

The AWS Global Infrastructure consists of 36 Regions with 114 AZs. Here’s an overview of all the AWS Regions and the number of AZs in each:

What are other AWS Global Infrastructure components?

In addition to Regions and AZs, there are a few other components of the AWS Global Infrastructure you should be familiar with:

Local Zones

AWS Local Zones are a part of the AWS infrastructure that brings core AWS services like computing, storage, and networking closer to major cities and densely populated areas, reducing latency for end users. Each Local Zone is connected to a parent Region, so the apps you run in Local Zones can seamlessly access other AWS services, such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

AWS Local Zones have a few important use cases:

1. Low-latency applications: Deploying your apps in AWS Local Zones brings them closer to your end users, providing seamless, real-time experiences without delays. This makes Local Zones perfect for apps focused on live streaming or augmented reality.

2. Data residency: You have absolute control over where your workloads run and where the data is stored. This can be crucial for heavily regulated industries like finance or healthcare, where data often needs to remain in a specific location to comply with local laws.

3. Migration and modernization: Migrating traditional locally hosted apps to the cloud can often trigger performance issues and delays. You can use an AWS Local Zone to migrate segments of your apps to make sure there are no interruptions.

Many companies have leveraged the power of AWS Local Zones, including:

Edge Locations

Edge Locations are yet another link in the AWS chain, serving as AWS endpoints for caching content. Only specific AWS services like CloudFront (AWS’ content delivery network) use Edge Locations to optimize content delivery and increase performance.

Like other components of the AWS global infrastructure, Edge Locations are strategically deployed around the world. They’re efficient because they store frequently accessed content (images, videos, and other static files) close(r) to end users. 

Let’s say you have a website that hosts images using Amazon S3 storage service in the Ohio Region. When a user in New Delhi sends a request for that image, the request would typically travel thousands of miles to reach the Ohio data center, which results in high latency and slower load times. 

You can avoid this by routing the request to an Edge Location in India close to New Delhi—the Edge Location would fetch the image from the S3 storage in the Ohio data center and deliver it to the user. Now that the image is cached in that Edge location, another user from India who requests the same image would get it much faster.

Wavelength Zones

Wavelength Zones represent AWS infrastructure deployments that bring compute and storage services to the edge of 5G networks to minimize latency. This enables you to deliver applications focusing on speed, such as live streaming, augmented reality, or real-time gaming, with minimal lags.

A real-life example of how Wavelength Zones are used is in autonomous vehicles. Here’s how it works:

1. Data collection and transmission: Autonomous vehicles have various sensors that pick up data from their surroundings in real time. Since the vehicles’ functionality depends on this data, it has to be processed ASAP, so it gets transmitted via the 5G network.

2. AWS Wavelength Zones at the edge of the 5G network: Instead of sending the data to a distant AWS Region (which wouldn’t be fast enough for this use case), the data gets routed to a Wavelength Zone at the very edge of the 5G network, near the vehicle. This enables almost immediate processing of the sensor data.

3. Real-time data processing and decision making: AWS solutions such as EC2 instances, AI models, or other computing resources process the sensor data as they receive it to support the vehicle’s immediate decision making. Based on this, the vehicle “makes” decisions to brake, turn, accelerate, etc.

4. Action: The vehicle reacts to its environment in near real time to ensure maximum safety and responsiveness. Thanks to Wavelength Zones, the entire system’s reaction time is significantly reduced compared to relying on a relatively remote cloud data center.

Regional edge caches

Regional edge caches represent globally deployed CloudFront locations between your origin server and points-of-presence (POPs), which are global edge networks delivering content directly to users.

In a way, regional edge caches are an accessory to individual POPs. Namely, POPs will remove less popular objects to make room for popular content. Regional edge caches compensate for this relatively short-term memory because they have a larger cache and can keep those less popular objects at the nearest regional edge cache location. 

This keeps more content relatively close to your users so that CloudFront doesn’t have to work extra to go back to the original server to fetch it. 

What are the benefits of AWS Global Infrastructure?

The most obvious benefit of AWS Global Infrastructure is the access it provides to a wide range of cloud services. Here’s a closer look at the key advantages of AWS Global Infrastructure:

Top-notch security

The AWS Global Infrastructure is custom-built for the cloud and meets the strictest security standards worldwide.

For starters, the infrastructure is monitored 24/7 to ensure your data is protected at all times,  providing maximum integrity, availability, and confidentiality.

Another important security measure is the automatic encryption of data flowing through the AWS Global Infrastructure—the data gets encrypted at the physical layer before leaving AWS facilities, so the risk of interceptions or breaches is minimal.

High infrastructure availability

AWS is superior to all other cloud providers in terms of infrastructure availability. In other words, the AWS Global Infrastructure can work uninterrupted even if one of its components malfunctions.

This is possible because of the intricate network of Regions divided into multiple independent AZs. This setup guarantees strong fault isolation—if a Region or AZ within the AWS Global Infrastructure goes down, the rest of the infrastructure remains unaffected. 

Thanks to AWS’s high availability, your app won’t experience downtime in case of component failures. The reliability of the AWS Global Infrastructure is also beneficial from a financial point of view since every second of downtime can lead to significant financial losses.

Flexibility

The AWS Global Infrastructure covers essentially the entire planet, and its network keeps growing. This omnipresence offers a crucial benefit—flexibility.

Thanks to AWS’s vast infrastructure footprint, you can:

• Choose the technology infrastructure closest to your end users

• Run workloads on the cloud with the best support for the broadest set of applications

• Choose how and where to run workloads

AWS has a solution even for those whose data is literally out of this world. The AWS Ground Station provides satellite antennas close to AWS Regions, allowing you to scale your operations without building or maintaining your own ground station infrastructure. Common use cases for this fully managed services include:

• Weather forecasting

• Video broadcasting

• Surface imaging

With AWS, you can even run apps on-premises—all you need is AWS Outposts.

High performance

High performance is one of the most appreciated benefits of the AWS Global Infrastructure. It’s reflected in:

• AWS Regions that offer minimal delays and data loss, as well as a high network quality thanks to an ultra-fast network setup.

• AWS Local Zones and AWS Wavelength that deliver AWS infrastructure and services closer to end users and mobile devices and provide maximum support for apps that need single-digit millisecond latencies.

Depending on your app’s needs, the AWS Global Infrastructure enables you to deploy hundreds and thousands of servers within minutes to ensure stable and consistent performance.

Infinite scalability

The AWS Global Infrastructure has virtually no boundaries and allows you to enjoy the infinite scalability of the cloud. 

You no longer have to commit more resources just to be able to handle your business operations at peak activity. With the AWS Global Infrastructure, you can provision only the resources you need at any given moment to meet your users’ needs. It also gives you the flexibility to scale up or down whenever necessary.

This ability to optimize resources naturally leads to cost savings, as you won’t be paying for excess capacity that you only need during certain periods.

Optimize your cloud infrastructure with diagrams

The AWS and its underlying Global Infrastructure give you almost unlimited flexibility and capacity when building apps and workflows, unlocking the full potential of cloud computing. However, despite the immense possibilities you get with AWS, designing a functional cloud system architecture can still be a challenge.

Some of the reasons for this could be the many moving parts to account for, changing requirements or new additions to the system, or a lack of collaboration between cross-functional teams. 

One of the best ways to tackle these challenges and gain a deeper understanding of your cloud architecture is to draw it out using diagrams. But, diagramming can be harder than it sounds—your system’s size and complexity and the multiple stakeholders involved can make the visualization chaotic or unclear. 

Luckily, with the right tool, you can visualize and optimize any AWS cloud architecture and fully utilize AWS cloud solutions to ensure low latency and worldwide availability. Miro, for example, offers powerful AWS diagramming capabilities to make visualizing your cloud architecture a breeze.

AWS architecture visualization made easy with Miro

Miro is a top-notch Innovation Workspace that helps you plan, visualize, and centralize your work by relying on an intelligent canvas. The canvas is multifunctional and allows you to map out all kinds of processes and systems, including AWS cloud architectures. Miro’s key AWS diagramming capabilities include:  

• AWS Cloud View app: Miro lets you import data directly from your AWS account and generate a diagram of your AWS infrastructure. This convenient option is a massive time-saver—just sync your AWS account with Miro and let the app take care of the rest.

• AWS Cost Calculator: Whether you want to plan your spending or identify cost-saving opportunities, Miro’s AWS Cost Calculator will do the math for you.

• Diagram focus mode: Options like a curated toolbar and easy alignment and distribution updates help you become a diagramming pro in no time.

• AWS shape pack: Miro offers a rich library of AWS shapes to make diagramming as easy as possible.

• AWS diagramming templates: Instead of creating diagrams from scratch, take a shortcut with Miro’s 13+ AWS diagramming templates. They offer a premade structure but can be easily customized to your requirements.

If you’re ready to make the most out of your AWS resources and build well-architected cloud apps, sign up for a free Business trial to explore Miro’s robust AWS diagramming features.

Not sure what you can achieve with Miro? Check out how ClickHouse used the platform’s AWS capabilities to speed up feature development and streamline collaboration.