As an experienced full-stack developer building cloud-native applications, having an in-depth understanding of AWS‘s vast global infrastructure is critical to architecting highly available, low latency, and compliant systems.
AWS provides over 200 services to more than a million active customers across 240 countries and territories – representing the largest and most mature global cloud computing footprint.
In this comprehensive 3,000+ word guide for developers, we will explore AWS‘s backbone including:
We will also analyze how AWS compares to other major cloud providers in terms of global presence. Getting intimately familiar with these building blocks will allow us as full-stack engineers to make smart decisions around architecture, resiliency, performance, and regulatory compliance when building cloud-native applications.
Regions
An AWS Region represents a geographic area containing multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones.
As of February 2023, AWS operates in 87 Availability Zones within 25 geographic Regions around the world, with publicly announced plans to add 24 more Availability Zones and 8 more AWS Regions soon including Spain, Switzerland, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Greece, and United Arab Emirates (source).
When selecting AWS Region(s) to deploy infrastructure in, we need to evaluate factors such as:
- Compliance with data governance/privacy regulations (GDPR, HIPAA etc)
- Proximity to target users
- Service availability – Some newer Regions may not offer full breadth of AWS services
- Cost – Pricing, taxes and incentives vary across Regions
As a general best practice, full-stack developers should aim to deploy infrastructure across at least two or more Regions to achieve high availability in case an entire Region goes offline. Here is sample Node.js code leveraging the AWS SDK to deploy infrastructure across Regions:
// Launch EC2 instances across multiple Regions
const regions = ["us-east-1", “eu-west-1”];
regions.forEach(region => {
const ec2 = new AWS.EC2({region});
ec2.runInstances({
ImageId: "ami-0778521dv8974b33",
InstanceType: "t3.micro",
MinCount: 1,
MaxCount: 5
}).promise();
})AWS provides various database, deployment, and networking services like RDS Multi-AZ, ASG, Route53 Traffic Management and CloudFront to automatically distribute our workload across Regions to follow infrastructure best practices.
Availability Zones
An Availability Zone (AZ) represents an isolated location or data center within an AWS Region. Each AZ runs on its own physically distinct & independent infrastructure designed to be highly resilient even in cases of failure.
AWS operates at least three Availability Zones within most Regions (though expanding to 6, 9 or 15+ over time). As full-stack engineers, we must distribute workloads across multiple AZs to gracefully handle AZ-level failures:
// Create RDS MySQL instance across AZs
const rds = new AWS.RDS();
rds.createDBInstance({
Engine: “mysql”,
MultiAZ: true, // Deploy to multiple AZs for HA
MasterUsername: "foo",
})If correctly architected, the loss of a single AZ should not impact application availability. However, even web-scale cloud data centers can occasionally fail. For example, the well-publicized 2021 AWS US-EAST-1 outage caused widespread disruption across companies like Slack, Epic Games, Adobe and others.
By distributing critical infrastructure across AZs, our systems can gracefully failover during otherwise crippling regional issues.
Local Zones
AWS Local Zones provide low latency compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population centers. As developers, we can leverage Local Zones when building applications with ultra-low latency requirements such as:
- Real-time gaming
- Media production/encoding
- Augmented/virtual reality
- IoT processing
For example, placing a NoSQL database like AWS DynamoDB into a Local Zone could enable <10 millisecond reads and writes for geographically distributed applications.
There are currently over 35 AWS Local Zones across 26 countries globally (source) with expansions planned in Bangalore, Berlin, Miami and other cities.
Edge Locations
AWS operates hundreds of Points of Presence (POPs) globally known as Edge Locations. As the “front door” into the AWS backbone, Edge Locations enable faster delivery of content to end users by caching/processing data closer to website and application viewers.
Many AWS services leverage the Edge Network to cache content, including:
- CloudFront – AWS’s Content Delivery Network
- Amazon Route 53 – Highly distributed DNS resolution
- CloudFront Web Application Firewall (WAF) – Filters, monitors, and shields applications from exploits
By serving data from nearby Edge Locations instead of centralized AWS data centers, these services help deliver low latency, high transfer speed experiences globally.
To quantify AWS’s edge capacity, CloudFront alone operates 273 Point-of-Presence (PoP) locations in 94 metropolitan areas across 45 countries, with more added weekly (source).
In addition, third parties estimate AWS operates over 600 edge nodes globally – significantly more than competitors like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud (source). These vast and expanding edge resources allow full-stack developers to deliver seamless experiences around the world.
Direct Connect Locations
To enable hybrid cloud and high-bandwidth connectivity, AWS offers AWS Direct Connect (DX) at 50+ global points including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, London, Singapore, Sydney and others (source).
Developers can establish private 1/10/40/100 Gbps connections from on-premise data centers or corporate networks to AWS infrastructure through these DX locations instead of using the public Internet:
AWS Direct Connect provides private connectivity into AWS Regions (Source)
Use cases include migrating huge data workloads to the cloud, working with Big Data sets, and establishing fast hybrid IT solutions.
How AWS Compares to Other Cloud Providers
As surveyed, AWS operates the world’s largest and most mature global cloud infrastructure in terms of size, services, and functionality. But Microsoft, Google and other players are rapidly expanding their infrastructure as well. How does AWS compare?
| Metric | AWS | Microsoft Azure | Google Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regions | 27 | 16+ | 24 |
| AZs | 87 | 60+ | 73 |
| Edge Locations | 600+ | ~200 | 134 |
| DX Locations | 50+ | 51 | 26 |
| Services Offered | 200+ | 100+ | 200+ |
While Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have expanded significantly, AWS maintains competitive advantages in regions, global edge footprint, total services offered and hybrid connectivity options essential for developers (source).
However, all major players continue aggressively growing their infrastructure – great news for us leveraging these platforms.
Conclusion
As explored in this 3,000+ word guide, AWS‘s industry-leading global infrastructure provides unmatched choice, resiliency and compliance options for full-stack developers:
- 25 Regions allowing geography-based deployments
- 87 Availability Zones to provide high reliability
- 600+ Edge Locations enabling low latency applications
- 200+ Services serving a wide array of customer needs
Architecting systems leveraging these building blocks across areas like databases, compute, networking, analytics and security is key for production-ready cloud applications.
While competitors like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are rapidly growing as viable alternatives in many regards, AWS maintains definitive advantages in global footprint – built over 15+ years of cloud leadership.
Understanding the scale, distribution and interconnectivity of resources across the AWS backbone gives us as developers a blueprint for architecting highly available, robust and secure cloud-native applications ready for a global audience.
