Global Infrastructure and Reliability Flashcards
When determining the right Region for your services, data, and applications, consider the following four business factors.
Compliance with data governance and legal requirements
Proximity to your customers
Available services within a Region
Pricing
Compliance with data governance and legal requirements
Depending on your company and location, you might need to run your data out of specific areas. For example, if your company requires all of its data to reside within the boundaries of the UK, you would choose the London Region.
Not all companies have location-specific data regulations, so you might need to focus more on the other three factors.
Proximity to your customers
Selecting a Region that is close to your customers will help you to get content to them faster. For example, your company is based in Washington, DC, and many of your customers live in Singapore. You might consider running your infrastructure in the Northern Virginia Region to be close to company headquarters, and run your applications from the Singapore Region.
Available Services within your region
Sometimes, the closest Region might not have all the features that you want to offer to customers. AWS is frequently innovating by creating new services and expanding on features within existing services. However, making new services available around the world sometimes requires AWS to build out physical hardware one Region at a time.
Suppose that your developers want to build an application that uses Amazon Braket (AWS quantum computing platform). As of this course, Amazon Braket is not yet available in every AWS Region around the world, so your developers would have to run it in one of the Regions that already offers it.
Pricing
Suppose that you are considering running applications in both the United States and Brazil. The way Brazil’s tax structure is set up, it might cost 50% more to run the same workload out of the São Paulo Region compared to the Oregon Region. You will learn in more detail that several factors determine pricing, but for now know that the cost of services can vary from Region to Region.
Availability Zone
AWS calls a single data center or a group of data centers, an Availability Zone or AZ
Each Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity. When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, it launches a virtual machine on a physical hardware that is installed in an Availability Zone. This means each AWS Region consists of multiple isolated and physically separate Availability Zones within a geographic Region.
Why are Availability Zones built in different locations?
But we don’t build Availability Zones right next to each other because if a large scale incident were to occur, like a natural disaster, for example, you could lose connectivity to everything in that Availability Zone. The question what happens in case of a disaster matters and if you are familiar with disaster recovery planning, you might even have an idea of where we are going with this.
What if you run only one EC2 Instance?
If you only run one EC2 instance, it only runs in one building, or one Availability Zone and a large scale disaster occurs, will your application still be able to run and serve your business?
The obvious solution to this is to run multiple EC2 instances, just like we showed in the scaling example earlier. But the main thing is don’t run them in the same building. Don’t even run them in the same street, push them as far apart as you can before the speed of light tells you to stop if you still want low latency communication. Turns out that the speed of light will let us move these Availability Zones tens of miles apart from each other and still keep single digit millisecond latency between these Availability Zones. Now, if a disaster strikes, your application continues just fine because this disaster only knocked over some of your capacity, not all.
And as a best practice with AWS
, we always recommend you run across at least two Availability Zones in a Region. This means redundantly deploying your infrastructure in two different AZs.
Availability Zone
An Availability Zone is a single data center or a group of data centers within a Region. Availability Zones are located tens of miles apart from each other. This is close enough to have low latency (the time between when content requested and received) between Availability Zones. However, if a disaster occurs in one part of the Region, they are distant enough to reduce the chance that multiple Availability Zones are affected.
Edge locations
An edge location is a site that Amazon CloudFront uses to store cached copies of your content closer to your customers for faster delivery.
Ways to interact with AWS Services
AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, SDKs
The AWS Management Console
The AWS Management Console is a web-based interface for accessing and managing AWS services. You can quickly access recently used services and search for other services by name, keyword, or acronym. The console includes wizards and automated workflows that can simplify the process of completing tasks.
AWS Console mobile app
You can also use the AWS Console mobile application to perform tasks such as monitoring resources, viewing alarms, and accessing billing information. Multiple identities can stay logged into the AWS Console mobile app at the same time.
AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)
o save time when making API requests, you can use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). AWS CLI enables you to control multiple AWS services directly from the command line within one tool. AWS CLI is available for users on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
By using AWS CLI, you can automate the actions that your services and applications perform through scripts. For example, you can use commands to launch an Amazon EC2 instance, connect an Amazon EC2 instance to a specific Auto Scaling group, and more.
