AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials: Module 4 - Going Global

This module covers the AWS global infrastructure in greater detail, including how to choose a region, the role of edge locations, and how to achieve high availability across multiple regions.

Introduction to Going Global

• Select a region based on where your customers are located, any regulatory requirements, expected latency, and cost.
• Edge locations cache content closer to end users, reducing latency and improving access speed.
• AWS CloudFormation enables you to define and manage your infrastructure as code (IaC), making deployments repeatable and consistent.

Choosing an AWS Region

When selecting a region, consider the following:

• Proximity — Where are your customers located? Placing resources close to them reduces latency.
• Compliance — Are there local regulations or data residency requirements that restrict where you can store data?
• Latency — How quickly do your users need to access your application?
• Cost — Pricing varies between regions; factor this into your decision.
• Feature availability — Not every AWS service is available in every region. Confirm that the services you need are offered in your chosen region.

Diving Deeper into AWS Global Infrastructure

• Regions are physical locations around the world where AWS operates data centres.
• Availability Zones (AZs) are isolated locations within a region, each with independent power, networking, and cooling.
• Using multiple regions increases high availability. If one region experiences an outage, you can fail over to another.
• Edge locations are separate from regions and are situated in major cities worldwide. They cache content closer to users using AWS CloudFront, which reduces latency for content delivery.
• AWS Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS service. It can route users to the nearest edge location using techniques such as geolocation-based routing.

Infrastructure and Automation

Deploying across multiple regions manually is error-prone and time-consuming. Infrastructure as Code solves this by letting you define your entire environment in templates.

• Use AWS CloudFormation to define and provision your infrastructure as code. CloudFormation reads your template and creates or updates resources accordingly.
• Create reusable templates that you can deploy consistently across multiple environments and regions.
• This approach ensures that your staging and production environments remain identical, reducing the risk of configuration drift.