AWS - Global Infrastructure

March 30, 2025

Why make a global application

A global application is an application deployed in multiple geographies
On AWS: This could be Regions and / or Edge Locations
Decreased Latency
- Latency is the time it takes for a network packed to reach a server
- It takes time for a packet from Asia to reach the US
- Deploy your applications closer to your users to decrease latency, better experience
Disaster Recovery(DR)
- If an AWS region goes down (earthquake, storms, power shutdown, politics)...
- You can fail-over to another region and have your application still working
- A DR plan is important to increase the availability of your applications
Attack protection: distributed global infrastructure is harder to attack

Regions: For deploying applications and infrastructure
Availability Zones: Made of multiple data centers
Edge Locations (Points of Presence): For content delivery as close as possible to users
https://infrastructure.aws/

Global DNS: Route 53
- Great to route users to the closest deployment with least latency
- Great for disaster recovery strategies
Global Content Delivery Network (CDN): CloudFront
- Replicate part of your application to AWS Edge Locations - decrease latency
- Cache common requests - improved user experience and decreased latency
S3 Transfer Acceleration
- Accelerate global uploads & downloads into Amazon S3
AWS Global Accelerator:
- Improve global application availability and performance using the AWS global network

Route53 is a Managed DNS ( Domain Name System)
DNS is collection of rules and records which helps clients understand how to reach a server through URLs
In AWS, the most common records are:
- www.google.com -> 12.34.56.78 == A record (IPV4)
- www.google.com -> 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 == AAAA IPV6
- search.google.com -> www.google.com -> CNAME: hostname to hostname
- example.com -> AWS resource == Alias (ex: ELB, CloudFront, S3, RDS, etc...)

Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Improves read performance, content is cached at the edge
Improves users experience
216 Point of Presence globally (edge locations)
DDos protection (because worldwide), integration with Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall

S3 buckets
- For distributing files and caching them at the edge
- Enhanced security with CloudFront Origin Access Control (OAC)
- OAC is replacing Origin Access Identify (OAI)
- CloudFront can be used as an ingress (to upload files to S3)
Custom Origin (HTTP)
- Application Load Balancer
- EC2 instance
- S3 website (must first enable the bucket as a static S3 website)
- Any HTTP backend you want

CloudFront:
- Global Edge network
- Files are cached for a TTL (maybe a day)
- Great for static content that must be available everywhere
S3 Cross Region Replication:
- Must be setup for each region you want replication to happen
- Files are updated in near real-time
- Read only
- Great for dynamic content that needs to be available at low-latency in few regions

Increase transfer speed by transferring file to an AWS edge location which will forward the data to the S3 bucket in the target region

Improve global application availability and performance using the AWS global network
Leverage the AWS internal network to optimize the route to your application (60% improvement)
2 Anycast IP are created for your application and traffic to your application

They both use the AWS global network and its edge locations around the world
Both services integrate with AWS Shield for DDoS protection
CloudFront - Content Delivery Network
- Improves performance for your cacheable content (such as images and videos)
- content is served at the edge
Global Acclerator
- No caching, proxing packets at the edge to applications running in one or more AW Regions.
- Improves performance for a wide range of applications over TCP or UDP
- Good for HTTP use cases that require static IP addresses
- Good for HTTP use cases that required deterministic, fast regional failover

Hybrid Cloud: businesses that keep an on-premises infrastructure alongside a cloud infrastructure
Therefore, two ways of dealing with IT systems:
- One for the AWS cloud (using the AWS console, CLI, and AWS APIs)
- One for their on-premises infrastructure
AWS Outposts are "server racks" that offers the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs & tools to build your own applications on-premises just as in the cloud
AWS will setup and manage "Outposts Racks" within your on-premises infrastructure and you can start leveraging AWS services on-premises
*You are responsible for the Outposts Rack physical security
Benefits:
- Low-latency access to on-premises systems
- Local data processing
- Data residency
- Easier migration from on-premises to the cloud
- Fully managed service
- Some services that work on Outposts: EC2, EBS, S3, EKS, ECS, RDS and EMR

Wave Length Zones are infrastructure deployments, embedded within the telecommunications providers datacenters at the edge of the 5G networks
Brings AWS services to the edge of the 5G networks
Example: EC2, EBS VPC...
Ultra-low latency applications through 5G networks
Traffic doesn't leave the Communication Service Provider's (CSP) network
High-bandwidth and secure connection to the parent AWS Region
No addition charges or service agreements
Use cases: Smart Cities, ML-assisted diagnostics, Connected Vehicle, Interactive Live Video Streams, AR/VR, real-time Gaming...

Places AWS compute, storage, database, and other selected AWS services closer to end users to run latency-senstitive, applications
Extend your VPC to more locations - "Extension of an AWS Region"
Compatible with EC2, RDS, ECS, EBS, ElastiCache, Direct Connect...
Example:
- AWS Region: North Virginia (us-east-1)
- AWS Local Zones: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Miami, ...

Single Region, Single AZ
- X High Availability
- X Global latency
- V Difficulty
Single Region, Multi AZ
V high Availability
X Global Latency
+- Difficulty
Multi Region, Active-Passive
- V Global Reads' Latency
- X Global Writes' Latency
- +- Difficulty
Multi Region, Active-Active
- V Reads' Latency
- V Writes' Latency
- ++ Difficulty