General knowledge

Question 1

Edge Locations

Answer 1

They power several services:
amazon cloud front
route 53
api gateways

amazon has a number of different edge locations, not all of them are actually drawn, but we do have, currently, at the time of this video, more than 100 edge locations worldwide. Many of them actually exist outside of a region. They could be just like a colocation, or a small data center that AWS has and runs in that area specifically for an edge location. Now, we don’t necessarily have direct access to the edge location itself, they’re more passive. So if we were to use Cloud Front, for example, and leverage the content delivery network, then we could have our application run in, say, U.S. East in Virginia. Instead of making our European audience cross the Atlantic for every single request, we can use DNS to forward our European audience to an edge location in Europe, so that they can download content that is cached on a server closest to them. So the first person who asks for a piece of content would have the latency of crossing the Atlantic, but then everyone else, perhaps the next million people who ask for that same URL, would benefit from having it cached closest to them. And then of course, the same thing works with DNS. DNS servers running in edge locations all over the world, allows us to respond to DNS queries with the lowest latency as well.

Question 2

Cloud Front

Answer 2

Content delivery network

Question 3

Route 53

Answer 3

Global DNS service

Question 4

API gateways

Answer 4

serversless api