AWS Cloud Overview – Regions & AZ – Smart Cherrys Thoughts- Now lets look at the history of AWS Cloud.

• So it was launched in 2002 internally in amazon.com
• Because they realized the IT Departments could be externalized.
• So their Amazon Infrastructure was one of the core strength
• and they said you know what may be we can do IT for someone else.
• “for other people“
• So they launched their first offering publicly which was SQS in 2004.
• In 2006, They expanded their offering.
• and they relaunched with the availability of SQS, S3 and EC2.
• Dont worry, we’ll see all these services in this course.
• Then They Expanded and said, ” you know what?
• We dont have to be just in America.
•  We could be in Europe.
• And Then Fast forward to Today.
• We have so many applications that used to run or still running on AWS.
• Such as Dropbox, Netflix, Airbnb, or even the NASA.

AWS Cloud Number Facts-

• Now, lets look at where AWS is today.
• If we look at the Gartner magic quadrants which sort of ranks the cloud providers.
• As we can see AWS is on the top right corner.
• Which is the leader.
• Its able to execute really very well.
• And it has a really great completeness of vision.
• It is followed closely by Microsoft and google.
• But still 2019, AWS had 35 billion in annual revenue.
• which is huge and accounted for 47% of the market in 2019.
• with Microsoft being second with 22%
• So by learning AWS you are leaning a tool that is widely used.
• It is a pioneer and leader of the AWS Cloud Markets for the ninth consecutive year.
• And it has over 1 million active users.

So what can you build on AWS?

AWS Cloud Use Cases

• Well pretty much everything.
• AWS will enable you to build sophisticated and scalable applications.
• And They are applicable to diverse set of industries.
• Every company has a use case for the cloud.
• So Netflix, McDonald’s, 21st century Fox, Activision,
• They are all using cloud.
• And use cases can include just transferring your enterprise IT
• or using the cloud as a backup and storage.
• or doing some big data analytics.
• You can also host a website.
• or create a Backend for your mobile and your social applications.
• or you could have your entire, gaming servers running on the clouds.
• The applications are endless.

Now AWS is Global

AWS Global Infrastructure

• And this is where we are going to learn a bit more specifics
• about how it works.
• So we have AWS Regions.
• We have availability zones, data centers.
• Edge locations, and points of presence.
• And all of these can be represented on the map right here.
• So lets go on this website to have a quick look at it https://infrastructure.aws/
• So this is a cool map.
• Because in this website we can see how AWS is global.
• So we can see that AWS has multiple regions.
• and they’re in orange they’re all around the world.
• For example, Paris, In Spain, In Ohio,
• in Sao Paulo, Cape Town, Mumbai, and everywhere else.
• So AWS truly is a global service.
• on top of it, each region are going to be connected through the network.
• So the lines in between region to region these are network reconnecting regions.
•  and this is a private network of AWS.
• then within each region, for example,
• if I really scroll into the Cape Town region,
• we can see that we have blue dots.
• and each blue dots will be availability zones.
•  So we can see what i want to get you out of this,
• is that the AWS is truly is global.
•  and we can leverage the infrastructure of a cloud provider to make ourselves, our application global.
• The first important concept in AWS are regions.
• So regions are all around the world.
• and we saw it on the map from before
• he regions have a name.
• it could be us-east-1, eu-west-3,
• and we can see the mapping of the name of the region.
• to their code on the console.
• Now a region, what is it?
• It’s truly,
• well, its going to be a cluster of data centers.
• Look at it (indistinct) for example,
• Ohio or Singapore or Sydney or Tokyo.
• When we use AWS Services,
• Most services are going to be linked and scoped to a specific region.
• That means that if we use a service
• in one region and we try to use it in another region,
• it will be like a new time of using the service.

How to choose an AWS Region?

• Now, a question that may come up
•  in the exam is how do you choose an AWS Region?
• So Say you’re launching a new application.
• where should you do it?
• Should you do it in America or Europe?
• In South America, or in Australia?
• Well, the answer is, of course it depends.
• But let’s look at some factors that may impact your choice.
• of a AWS region.
• The first one is Compliance.
• So sometimes governments want the data to be local
• to the country you’re deploying the application in.
• For example, France,
• data in France may have to stay in France therefore you should launch your application.
• in the French region.
• Then, there is also a concept of latency.
• So if most of your users are going to be in America,
• it makes lot of sense to deploy your application in America,
• close to your users,
•  because they will have reduced latency.
• If you deploy your application in Australia and your users are in America,
• they will have a lot of lag at using your application.
• Then, also not all regions have all services.
• Okay?
• Some regions do not have services.
• And so obviously if you’re
• leveraging a service with your application,
• you need to make sure that the region you’re deploying into
• is available and does have that service.
• And finally,
• Pricing.
• So Pricing does vary from region to region
• and you need to consult the applicant, the services, pricing, (indistinct)
• to see what the differences are between the regions.
• But this could be obviously a factor that could
• impact your deployment.
• of an application into a specific region.

AWS Availability Zones

• Now, availability zones are what actually are going into the region.
• So each region will have many availability zones.
• Usually three, the minimum is two, and maximum is six.
• But, really the usual is three.
• So, lets take the Sydney region as an example.
• The Sydney region code is ap-southeast-2
• so we can have two,
• have three availability zones in Sydney, ap-southeast-2a,
• ap-southeast-2b,
• and ap-southeast-2c.
• Now, each of these availability zones
• are going to be one or more
• just create data centers that will have redundant power,
• networking and connectivity.
• That means that in
• Southeast-2a,
• I Can have two data centers maybe, as well two in 2b and two in 2c.
• But it could be one, it could be three, it could be four.
• we dont really know.
• AWS doesn’t tell us that.
• But what we know is that these availability zones are separate from each other.
• So that they will be isolated from disasters.
• So if something happens to ap-southeast-2a,
• we know that it is designed not to cascade
• into ap-southeast-2b- or ap-southeast-2c
• So they’re really isolated from disasters.
• And then these data centers,
• these availability zones,
• they are connected with high bandwidth,
• ultra low latency networking and therefore
• altogether being linked together.
• it will form a region.
• Okay.

Next to, the only thing we need to know

about AWS for the global infrastructure is the points or presence or edge locations.

AWS Points of Presence (Edge Locations)

• We will see them in details in global section of this course.
• but you should know that AWS has more than 200 points of presence in 84 cities across 42 countries.
• And this will be very helpful when we deliver content.
• to the end users with the lowest latency possible.
• Again im going quickly over this because we will see this at the,
• about the middle of this course.

So now how about we just play around and do a tour of the console.

• we’ll see that AWS has global services such
• as IAM, Route 53, CloudFront, and WAF.
• but we’ll see that also most AWS services are doing to regions scoped.
• Such as Amazon EC2, Elastic Beanstalk,
• Lambda and Rekognition.

Finally, to know if a service is available in your region, There is a region table you should check out right here.

Region table- https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/