Module 3 - AWS Global Infrastructure Overview

Topics

• AWS Global Infrastructure
• AWS service and service category overview

1. AWS Global Infrastructure

• The AWS Global Infrastructure is designed and built to deliver a flexible, reliable, scalable, and secure cloud computing environment with high-quality global network performance.

1. AWS Regions

An AWS Region is a geographical area with one or more Availability Zones. An availability zone consists of one or more data centers.

• To achieve fault tolerance and stability, AWS regions are isolated from one another.
  • Resources in one region are not automatically replicated to another.
  • It is your responsibility to replicate data across regions if your business requires it.

AWS regions introduced before March 20th → enabled by default. Any regions introduced after → disabled by default (you must enable them to use them)

1. Selecting a Region

• It’s imperative to consider data governance and legal requirements when selecting an AWS region. Local laws might require that certain information be kept within geographical boundaries.
• It’s desirable to store your data in regions that are close to your users as possible. → reduce the latency for users and the systems trying to access your AWS resources.
  • To test this latency between the location and your AWS region, you can use Cloud Ping.
• Not all AWS services are available in all regions.
• There’s variation to the cost of running services, which can depend on which region you choose.

2. Availability Zones

An AWS region has multiple isolated locations that are known as availability zones.

• They provide the ability to operate applications and databases that are more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable than they would be in a single data center.
• When an application is partitioned across availability zones, applications are better isolated and protected from issues. (e.g. a failure of an availability zone doesn’t affect the entire application)

Every availability zone can include multiple data centers, typically three. Each availability zone is a fully isolated partition of AWS Global Infrastructure:

• There are currently 69 availability zones worldwide.
• Availability zones consist of discrete data centers.
• They are designed for fault isolation.
• They are interconnected with other availability zones by using high-speed private networking.
• You choose your availability zones.
• AWS recommends replicating data and resources across multiple availability zones for resiliency.

3. AWS Data Centers

The foundation for AWS infrastructure is the data centers, the location where actual data resides.

• Customers do not specify a data center for the deployment of a resource because an availability zone is the most granular level of specification.

AWS data centers are designed for security.

• Each location is evaluated to mitigate environmental risk.
• Data centers are designed with failure in mind. → critical system components are backed up across multiple availability zones.
• To ensure capacity, AWS monitors service usage to deploy infrastructure and support of availability.
• Data centers locations are not disclosed and all access to them is restricted.
• A data center typically has 50,000 to 80,000 physical servers.

4. Points of Presence

AWS Points of Presence are located in most of the major cities around the world.

• By continuously measuring internet connectivity, performance and computing to find the best way to route requests, the Points of Presence deliver a better near real-time user experience.
• They are used by many AWS services, including Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) services.
• Consists of edge locations and a much smaller number of Regional edge caches.

1. Edge locations are endpoints for CloudFront where content is cached and delivered to end users.
   • When a user requests content, CloudFront routes the request to the nearest edge location.
   • If the content is already cached at that edge location, CloudFront delivers it directly to the user.
   • If the content is not cached, CloudFront retrieves it from the origin server and then delivers it to the user.
2. Regional edge caches are used by default with Amazon CloudFront.
   • Used when you have content that is not accessed frequently enough to remain in an edge location.
   • Regional edge caches absorb this content and provide an alternative to that content having to be fetched from the origin server.

• Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network used to distribute content to end-users in order to reduce latency.
• Amazon Route 53 is a Domain Name System (DNS) service.
• Requests going to either one of these services will be routed to the nearest edge location automatically in order to lower latency.

5. AWS Infrastructure Benefits

• Elasticity and scalability:
  • Elastic infrastructure, dynamic adaption of capacity.
  • Scalable infrastructure, adapts to accommodate growth.
• Fault-tolerance:
  • Continues operating properly in the presence of a failure thanks to built-in redundancy of components.
• High availability:
  • High level of operational performance.
  • Minimized downtime
  • No human intervention

2. AWS Services & Service Category

1. AWS Foundational Services

AWS Global Infrastructure can be broken down into three elements: Regions, Availability Zones, and Points of Presence, which include edge locations.

• Provides the platform for a broad set of services, such as networking, storage, compute services, and databases.
• Delivered as an on demand utility that is available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing.

2. AWS Categories of Services

There are 23 different product or service categories, and each category consists of one or more service.

1. Storage Service Category

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage service offering scalability data availability, security, and performance.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), high performance block storage designed for use with Amazon EC2, for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads.
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), scalable fully managed elastic network file system (NFS), for use within AWS Cloud Services and on-premise resources.
• Amazon Simple Storage Services Glacier, secure, durable, and extremely low cost AWS S3 Cloud storage class for data archiving and long-term backup.

2. Compute Service Category

• Amazon Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), provides resizable compute capacity as virtual machines in the cloud.
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Service, enables automatically adding/removing EC2 instances according to the conditions that you define.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), highly scalable, highly performance container orchestration service that provides Docker containers.
• Amazon EC2 Container Registry (Amazon ECR), is a fully managed Docker container registry that makes it easier to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a service for deploying and scaling web applications and services on familiar servers (Apache, Microsoft IIS).
• AWS Lambda, enables you to run your code without provisioning or managing servers and pay only when your code is running.
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications that use Kubernetes on AWS.
• AWS Fargate, a compute engine for Amazon ECS, allows running containers without having to manage servers/clusters.

3. Database Service Category

• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), relational database in the cloud, providing resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration (hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups).
• Amazon Aurora, a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database, set up to be 5 times faster than standard MySQL databases, 3 times faster than PostgreSQL databases.
• Amazon Redshift, enables running analytic queries against petabytes of data stored locally in Amazon, delivers fast performance at any scale.
• Amazon DynamoDB, NoSQL database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale with built-in security, backup, and restore, and in-memory caching.

4. Networking & Content Delivery Service Category

• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), enables you to provision logically isolated sections of the AWS Cloud.
• Elastic Load Balancing, automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets (Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, Lambda functions).
• Amazon CloudFront (CDN), delivery network that security delivers data, videos, applications, and application programming interfaces (APIs), to customer globally with low latency and high transfer speed.
• Amazon Transit Gateway, connect Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and on-premises networks to a single centrally managed gateway.
• Amazon Route 53, scalable cloud domain name system (DNS) web service to reliably route end suers to the Internet application.
• AWS Direct Connect, establish a dedicated private network connection, from your data center/office to AWS → to reduce costs and increase bandwidth throughput.
• AWS VPN, provides a private tunnel for network/device to the AWS global network.

5. Security, identity, and compliance Service Category

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), manage access to AWS services and resources securely.
• AWS Organizations, restrict what services and actions are allowed in your accounts.
• Amazon Cognito, allows adding user authentication and access control to your web and mobile apps.
• AWS Artifact, provides on-demand access to AWS security and compliance reports, online agreements.
• AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), create/manage encryption keys.
• AWS Shield, a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) that safeguards application running on AWS.

6. Cost Management Service Category

• AWS Cost and Usage Report, comprehensive set of AWS cost usage data available.
• AWS Budgets, set custom budgets alert when AWS costs/usage exceeds budgeted amount.
• AWS Cost Explorer, visualize and manage AWS cost and usage overtime.

7. Manage and Governance Service Category

• AWS Management Console, web-based user interface for accessing your AWS account.
• AWS Config, helps track resource inventory and changes.
• AWS Cloud Watch, monitor resources and applications.
• AWS Auto Scaling, allows scaling multiple resources to meet demand.
• AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), unified tool to manage AWS services.
• AWS Trusted Advisor, online tool to help optimize performance and security using AWS best practices.
• AWS Well-Architected Tool, help reviewing and improving workloads.
• AWS Cloud Trail, tracks users’ activities and API usage across AWS accounts

3. Sample Questions

Question 1:

→ Answer: AWS edge locations.

Question 2:

→ Answer: decrease.

Question 3:

→ Answer: True.

Question 4:

→ Answer: AWS Regions.

Question 5:

→ Answer: Fault tolerant, elastic and scalable.

Question 6:

→ Answer: True.

Question 7:

→ Answer: A data center can be used for more than one Availability Zone.

Question 8:

→ Answer: A region is a physical location that has multiple Availability Zones AND Each Region is located in a separated geographic area.

Question 9:

→ Answer: multiple.

Question 10:

→ Answer: False.