01 Availability Zones and Regions

Global Infrastructure is split between regions and availability zones. Currently, there are 31 regions and 99 availability zones. But this will change all the time.

1. What is a region?

A region is simply a location or we can be called it a geographical area. So it could be Northern Virginia, Sydney, etc.

2. What is an availability zone (AZ)?

We can think of the availability zone as a data center. In the availability zone, there may be several different data centers. But they are very close.

Each region consists of 3 or more availability zones.

So in this region, there are 3 availability zones: we've got availability zone A, availability zone B, availability zone C, et cetera, et cetera.

3. Edge locations

Edge locations are basically just endpoints for AWS, they are used for caching content. Typically this consists of things like CloudFront. CloudFront is AWS' content delivery network.

Summary

• A region is a physical location in the world that consists of 3 or more availability zones.
• An availability zone is one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity.
• Edge locations which are endpoints for AWS that are used for caching content.
• CloudFront: which is Amazon's content delivery network.