You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
AWS has built one of the largest and most reliable cloud infrastructures in the world. Understanding how this infrastructure is organised is essential for designing applications that are highly available, fault-tolerant, and performant.
AWS infrastructure is organised into three main components:
An AWS Region is a physical location in the world where AWS clusters data centres.
eu-west-2 (London), us-east-1 (N. Virginia)When selecting a region, consider these factors:
| Factor | Consideration |
|---|---|
| Compliance | Does regulation require data to stay in a specific country? |
| Latency | Choose the region closest to your users |
| Service availability | Not every region has every service |
| Pricing | Prices vary between regions |
Each AWS Region contains multiple Availability Zones — typically 3 or more.
An AZ is one or more discrete data centres with redundant power, networking, and connectivity. AZs within a region are:
If one AZ fails (fire, flood, power outage), the others in the same region continue operating. By distributing your application across multiple AZs, you achieve high availability.
Example architecture:
Region: eu-west-2 (London)
├── AZ: eu-west-2a — Web server 1, DB primary
├── AZ: eu-west-2b — Web server 2, DB replica
└── AZ: eu-west-2c — Web server 3, DB replica
If eu-west-2a goes down, servers in eu-west-2b and eu-west-2c continue serving traffic.
Edge locations are AWS data centres designed to deliver content to end users with low latency. They are separate from regions and AZs.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.