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AWS Infrastructure and Reliability

Selecting a Region

When choosing an AWS Region for your services, applications, and data, consider the following four key business factors:

  • Some businesses must store and process data within specific geographic boundaries.
  • Example: A company requiring data to stay in the UK would select the London Region.
  • If no legal restrictions apply, other factors may take priority.

Proximity to Customers

  • Choosing a Region closer to your users helps reduce latency and improve performance.
  • Example: A Washington, DC-based company with customers in Singapore might deploy applications in the Singapore Region for faster content delivery.

Available Services in the Region

  • Not all AWS services are available in every Region.
  • Some features, such as Amazon Braket, are only offered in select Regions.
  • Be sure to verify service availability before selecting a Region for your application.

Pricing Differences

  • Service pricing can vary significantly by Region.
  • Example: Due to tax differences, running a workload in the São Paulo Region might cost 50% more than in the Oregon Region.
  • Consider regional pricing when planning your infrastructure.

Availability Zones

An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more data centers within an AWS Region. Each Region contains multiple AZs that are: located tens of miles apart for fault tolerance and close enough to maintain low latency between them

Purpose of Availability Zones

  • Designed to reduce the risk of a single point of failure
  • Provide high availability and resilience
  • Help maintain application uptime even during localized outages

Example: Running EC2 Instances

Single Availability Zone Setup:

  • An application runs on an EC2 instance in us-west-1a (Northern California).
  • If us-west-1a fails, the application becomes unavailable.

Multiple Availability Zones Setup:

  • A second EC2 instance is deployed in us-west-1b.
  • If us-west-1a fails, the application continues to run in us-west-1b.

Best Practice

To increase availability and fault tolerance, always run applications across at least two Availability Zones within a Region.

Edge Locations

An edge location is a site used by Amazon CloudFront to cache copies of content closer to customers for faster delivery.

How It Works

  • Your original data (the origin) may be stored in a distant AWS Region.
  • Instead of serving data directly from the origin, CloudFront caches the data at an edge location near the customer.
  • When a customer requests content, CloudFront delivers it from the nearest edge location, reducing latency and improving performance.

Example

  • A customer in China requests a file.
  • CloudFront checks the edge location cache near China.
    • If the file is cached there, it’s delivered quickly to the customer.
    • If not, it’s retrieved from the origin in Brazil, cached at the edge location, and then delivered.

Ways to Interact with AWS Services

AWS provides multiple methods to access and manage its services, depending on your preferences and use case.

AWS Management Console

  • A web-based interface for managing AWS services.
  • Features search, wizards, and automated workflows to simplify tasks.
  • Includes a mobile app for monitoring resources, viewing alarms, and checking billing.
  • Supports multiple simultaneous logins on the mobile app.

AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)

  • A command-line tool for managing AWS services.
  • Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
  • Allows for automation via scripts (such as launching EC2 instances and configuring Auto Scaling groups).
  • Reduces time and effort when performing repetitive tasks.

Software Development Kits (SDKs)

  • Provide language-specific APIs for accessing AWS services.
  • Allow integration with existing applications or development of new applications on AWS.
  • SDKs are available for languages including C++, Java, .NET, Python, and more.
  • AWS offers documentation and sample code for supported languages to help you get started.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS CloudFormation

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform as a Service that simplifies application deployment.

  • You upload your code and configuration settings Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles:
  • Capacity adjustments
  • Load balancing
  • Automatic scaling
  • Application health monitoring

It is ideal for developers who want to deploy applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation enables Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

  • You define your infrastructure in code templates
  • CloudFormation provisions and configures resources automatically Benefits include:
  • Safe, repeatable deployments
  • Automation without writing custom scripts
  • Error handling with automatic rollback of failed changes