Basics

Question 1

what is a region

Answer 1

Well, region is a geographical area.

Each region consists of two or more availability zones.

Question 2

what’s an availability zone?

Answer 2

An availability zone is simply a data center.
An availability zone could technically be a collection
of data centers, but basically they’re facilities
that are very, very close to each other,
and each availability zone is spaced
away from another availability zone.

Question 3

what is an edge location?

Answer 3

Well, an edge location is basically
a content delivery network endpoint for CloudFront.
If you don’t know what a content delivery network is,
don’t worry, we’re gonna cover that off
in the networking section of the course.
But basically, it’s a way to cache or to cache,
depending on how you wanna pronounce it,
you’re very large media objects in the cloud.
So things like video files or pitches for example,
if I was a user in New York,
and I wanna download a video that’s hosted
let’s say, in Australia,
on the very first occasion,
it has to travel all the way across the world
to me in New York, and then I have to download it.
The second time somebody in New York accesses it,
it would be cached at an edge location in New York,
so you’d only have to download it
from a local server in New York.
And that’s basically how content delivery networks work.