AWS for DevOps — AWS Global Infrastructure

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AWS Global Infrastructure

When you create a resource on AWS — an EC2 instance, an S3 bucket, a database — it has to live somewhere physically. AWS has built a massive global network of data centres organised into Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations. Understanding this structure is critical for building reliable, low-latency applications.

Regions

A Region is a geographic area (like us-east-1 in Northern Virginia or eu-west-1 in Ireland) that contains multiple isolated data centres.

As of 2025, AWS has 33+ Regions across the globe.

Region Code Location Common Use
us-east-1 N. Virginia Default region, most services launch here first
us-west-2 Oregon Popular for cost-sensitive workloads
eu-west-1 Ireland European workloads, GDPR compliance
ap-south-1 Mumbai Indian subcontinent workloads
ap-southeast-1 Singapore Southeast Asia

Why Regions matter for DevOps:

  • Data residency — regulations may require data to stay in a specific country
  • Latency — deploy close to your users for faster response times
  • Service availability — not all services are available in every region
  • Cost — pricing varies by region (us-east-1 is often cheapest)

Availability Zones (AZs)

Each Region contains 2 to 6 Availability Zones (AZs). An AZ is one or more physical data centres with independent power, networking, and cooling.

  Region: us-east-1 (N. Virginia)
  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │                                             │
  │  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐  │
  │  │  AZ-1a   │  │  AZ-1b   │  │  AZ-1c   │  │
  │  │ (DC 1,2) │  │ (DC 3,4) │  │ (DC 5,6) │  │
  │  └──────────┘  └──────────┘  └──────────┘  │
  │       │              │              │       │
  │       └──── High-speed private links ──┘    │
  │                                             │
  └─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Key facts:

  • AZs within a Region are connected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking
  • AZs are physically separated — a fire, flood, or power outage in one AZ does not affect others
  • You should spread resources across multiple AZs for high availability

Example: If you run 2 EC2 instances — one in us-east-1a and one in us-east-1b — and an earthquake destroys 1a, your app still runs in 1b.

Edge Locations

Edge Locations are small data centres located in major cities worldwide (300+ locations). They are used by:

  • CloudFront (CDN) — cache content close to users
  • Route 53 (DNS) — resolve domain names faster
  • AWS WAF — filter malicious traffic at the edge

Edge Locations are not full Regions — they only cache and serve content, they do not run EC2 instances.

How to Choose a Region

When starting a new project, pick your Region based on:

  1. Compliance — Does regulation require data in a specific country?
  2. Latency — Where are your users? Deploy close to them.
  3. Service availability — Is the service you need available in that Region?
  4. Cost — Compare pricing across Regions (use the AWS Pricing Calculator)

Check the current Region by running:

$ aws configure get region
us-east-1

List all available Regions:

$ aws ec2 describe-regions --query "Regions[].RegionName" --output table
------------------
| DescribeRegions |
+----------------+
|  ap-south-1    |
|  eu-west-1     |
|  us-east-1     |
|  us-west-2     |
|  ...           |
+----------------+

Quick Reference

Concept Description
Region Geographic area with multiple data centres (e.g., us-east-1)
Availability Zone One or more isolated data centres within a Region
Edge Location Small cache point for CloudFront, Route 53, and WAF
Multi-AZ Deploy across AZs for fault tolerance
Region selection Based on compliance, latency, service availability, and cost

Next → Shared Responsibility Model

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