The transition to eCommerce has come a long way. And the switch is still continuing at a very high pace. In fact, with customers becoming increasingly digital-first, these businesses want their websites to be up and running 24/7 without disruptions or delayed load times. In fact, in one of the studies, Amazon revealed that a latency of even 100 milliseconds hurt their conversions by 7%!
This is where cloud computing and global infrastructures come into play. AWS Global Infrastructure ensures that your applications and websites are not only secure but also agile, extensive, and reliable. This blog will dive into the nuances of AWS Global Infrastructure, how it benefits, its components, and how it can help make websites highly available.
Let’s dive in.
What is AWS Global Infrastructure? Why do businesses need it?
AWS global infrastructure refers to the network or systems of data centers, edge locations, and other AWS services. They are established across the globe to provide cloud computing to every small or large business with top-notch and seamless cloud computing services.
Also Read: An Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS operates in 31 geographic regions globally, with plans to create 15 more Availability Zones and 5 more AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Each region has various availability zones. These are different locations within a region and are independent of failures in other availability zones.
Currently, they have 99 availability zones and 450+ points of presence. Along with this, AWS global infrastructure also has:
- 32 local zones
- 29 wavelength zones
- Presence in 245 countries and territories
- 115 direct connect locations
Besides, AWS consists of a global network of edge locations strategically located to provide low-latency access to AWS services for business globally. These edge locations help businesses support content delivery, edge computing, and other functions relying on low-latency access to data.
In addition to its data centers and edge locations, AWS also provides a range of other infrastructure services. These are mostly networking, storage, databases, and security services. All these capabilities are made highly available, scalable, and secure. The AWS global infrastructure helps businesses deploy their apps and websites worldwide with high availability, low latency, and optimal performance.
Also Get: Free Questions on AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Certification practice questions
Why do businesses need AWS global infrastructure?
Websites and applications need to be highly available and scalable if businesses want their online operations to go global. There’s no room for latency, glitches, or faults with business-critical apps or websites. Unfortunately, in earlier times with monolithic systems, you could not build fault-tolerant solutions using on-premises data.
So, the only way to build one was to resort to cloud vendors who had multiple data centers and gave access to multiple geographic locations. But again, they, too, had typical redundancies regarding building highly available and scalable websites and apps.
AWS global infrastructure helps you escape all these availability and scalability concerns when building websites. AWS Cloud offers a highly secure, reliable, and extensive global cloud infrastructure, which provides over 200 comprehensive services from data centers located around the world.
With AWS, you can easily deploy your application workloads globally with just one tap. Or, you can build and deploy business-critical apps and websites closer to your end-users with extremely low latency in single-digit milliseconds. You get flexible cloud infrastructure that you can customize to best-fit business needs while you enjoy all the resources you need, when and where you need them.
Moreover, AWS boasts the largest and most dynamic ecosystem, with millions of active customers and countless partners worldwide. Businesses of all sizes and types, from start-ups to enterprises to PSUs, are leveraging AWS global infrastructure to run a wide range of use cases.
Benefits of AWS global infrastructure
AWS global infrastructure offers innumerable benefits. Some of them are:
Advance security
AWS ensures the security of its core infrastructure, which is custom-built for the cloud and designed to meet the most stringent security requirements around the globe. The infrastructure undergoes continuous 24/7 monitoring to guarantee data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
AWS automatically encrypts all data flowing across its global network, interconnecting its data centers and regions at the physical layer before it leaves its secured facilities. This allows you to build on the most secure global infrastructure while retaining full control over your data.
Availability
AWS provides the highest network availability compared to any other cloud provider by offering fully isolated regions. Each consists of multiple availability zones (AZs), which serve as isolated partitions of its infrastructure. Customers can enhance availability and isolate any issues by separating their apps across multiple AZs within the same region. AWS also distributes its control planes and management console across regions and includes regional API endpoints designed to operate securely for at least 24 hours.
Performance
AWS built the Global Infrastructure to prioritize performance. AWS Regions maintain a high overall network quality with low latency and low packet loss. This is accomplished using a fully redundant 100 GbE fiber network backbone that can often provide many terabits of capacity between Regions. Users can quickly deploy the resources they need, spinning up hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes, regardless of their application requirements.
Scalability
The AWS Global Infrastructure allows companies to take advantage of the cloud’s infinite scalability. Previously, businesses over-provisioned to ensure they had sufficient capacity to handle their operations during peak activity levels. With AWS, businesses can now provision the exact amount of resources they need, secure in the knowledge that they can instantly scale up or down in response to their operational needs. This approach reduces costs and enhances a customer’s ability to meet their user’s demands.
Flexibility
The AWS Global Infrastructure allows you to choose where and how you want to run your workloads, with the assurance of utilizing the same network, control plane, APIs, and AWS services. To run applications globally, users can select from any available AWS Regions and AZs. To cater to applications that require single-digit millisecond latencies to mobile devices and end-users, AWS offers the option of using either AWS Local Zones or AWS Wavelength. For those who prefer to run their applications on-premises, AWS Outposts is an available option.
Global footprint
AWS proudly features the biggest global infrastructure footprint and is continuously expanding. You can choose a technology infrastructure closest to their primary target of users when deploying their applications and workloads to the cloud. The cloud service provider offers the best support for various applications, including those with the highest throughput and lowest latency requirements.
Elements of AWS global infrastructure
AWS global infrastructure comprises three components. Let’s cover them one by one.
Regions and availability zones
A geographical area defines a region, with each region comprising three or more availability zones. Each Amazon Region is entirely separated from the other Amazon Regions to ensure complete isolation. Multiple availability zones and data centers are present in each AWS Region. So, businesses can replicate data within a region or between regions using private or public internet connections.
Additionally, you can easily meet regional compliance and data residency requirements by maintaining complete control and ownership over the region where data resides. Note that data transfer between regions incurs charges. Selecting an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in the same region thus becomes necessary when launching an EC2 instance. In case the AMI is in another region, copying it to the region in use is an option. Most Amazon Web Services offer a regional endpoint for users to make requests to reduce data latency in applications.
Data centers in availability zones
Amazon maintains secrecy about its data center locations, but the locations of AZs are openly shared. Each Data Center (DC) has its own redundant power supply, routers, internet connectivity, etc., to prevent a single point of failure. The DCs are not interconnected. But are connected by high-speed internet for low latency. When creating a resource on AWS, users can select the Region and AZs, but not the specific DC within it. The choice of AWS Region is typically based on factors like pricing, security, compliance requirements, user/customer location, service availability, and latency.
Edge locations
The AWS Global Infrastructure uses Edge Locations for caching static and streaming data. Presently, the network comprises over 400 Edge Locations globally and more than 13 regional edge caches. In comparison to AZs, the number of Edge Locations is almost triple, and they are situated close to the end-users, making them an ideal choice for data caching. On the other hand, the regions are suitable for hosting web servers and databases.
Edge Locations offer lower latency than the Regions. When a user makes a request, the Edge Location checks whether the data is available locally. If not, it obtains the data from the relevant Region, stores it locally, and then forwards it to the user.
The term Edge Locations is specific to AWS CloudFront Service, and AWS refers to them as Points of Presence (PoP). Other Content Distribution Network (CDN) providers like Akamai, Cloudflare, etc. also offer similar services, where they cache data like streaming videos to enhance the end-user experience. The following table compares AWS terminology to general terminology.
How to create highly available websites using AWS Global infrastructures
The process involves the following steps.
- Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS service that helps you route traffic to your website. Use this to direct traffic to other numerous Amazon EC2 instances running in different Availability Zones or regions.
- Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing distributes traffic landing on your apps or websites across various Amazon EC2 instances, increasing the availability of your website. Configuring Elastic Load Balancing also helps route traffic to healthy instances in Availability Zones or regions.
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps adjust the capacity of your Amazon EC2 instances’ capacity to suit your website’s demand needs best. It also helps launch additional instances when traffic increases and terminate instances when traffic decreases.
- Amazon S3 and CloudFront
You can use Amazon S3 to store and serve static content like images, videos, and other files. Then use Amazon CloudFront to distribute this content to users worldwide. CloudFront has edge locations all around the world and can help reduce latency and improve performance.
- AWS Database services
AWS offers a range of database services like Amazon RDS, Aurora, and DynamoDB. These solutions are highly available and scalable and can be used to store and retrieve data for your website.
By combining these AWS services, you can create highly available websites or business-critical apps for your organizations, making them capable of handling high traffic and ensuring maximum uptime.
Here’s an example
To ensure the high availability of websites and apps, it’s crucial to avoid hosting them in a single Availability Zone (AZ) or region. Instead, deploying web servers across multiple AZs within the same region can help mitigate problems that may arise within a single AZ. Additionally, deploying web servers across multiple regions can further increase availability.
However, this redundancy comes at a cost, as multiple copies of the website need to be run. A multi-cloud configuration can be utilized to mitigate this cost, running the same web server across different cloud providers such as GCP or Azure. Google Anthos facilitates building hybrid and multi-cloud applications using Kubernetes.
AWS Elastic Load Balancers are used to distribute traffic among multiple web servers efficiently. These load balancers take requests from end-users and distribute them across multiple web servers.
Summary
Hope this blog helps you dive into the nuances of AWS global infrastructure. Also, we have covered how AWS global infrastructure helps you create highly available websites. Because organizations today can only grow with having scalable and highly available websites and apps, they are looking for professionals who have in-depth understanding and skills to handle AWS global infrastructure.
If you wish to turn this scope into a career stepping stone, the best way is to get yourself AWS certified. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification is the right step to achieve this since it covers the domain in detail. Check out Whizlabs training materials and resources that align with the cert requirements. You can also try our AWS hands-on labs and sandbox to understand the AWS environment and how AWS cloud tools and services work.
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