AWS Global Infrastructure

AWS Global Infrastructure enables Amazon Services to be hosted in multiple locations worldwide.
AWS Global Infrastructure provides the ability to place resources and data in multiple locations to improve performance, provide fault tolerance, high availability, and cost optimization.
AWS Global Infrastructure includes Regions, Availability Zones, Edge Locations, Regional Edge Caches, Local Zones, Wavelength Zones, and Dedicated Local Zones.
As of 2026, the AWS Cloud spans 39 Geographic Regions with 123 Availability Zones, 750+ Points of Presence (Edge Locations), 13 Regional Edge Caches, 30+ Local Zones, and 30+ Wavelength Zones.
AWS has announced plans for 7 more Availability Zones and 2 more AWS Regions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Chile.

Regions

AWS allows customers to place instances and store data within multiple geographic regions called Region.
Each region
- is an independent collection of AWS resources in a defined geography.
- is a separate geographic area and is completely independent
- is a physical location around the world with cluster data centers
- is designed to be completely isolated from the other regions & helps achieve the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability
- consists of at least three physically separate Availability Zones (AZs), with independent power infrastructure, cooling systems, network connectivity, and security systems
Inter-region communication is across the public Internet and appropriate measures should be taken to protect the data using encryption.
Data transfer between regions is charged at the Internet data transfer rate for both the sending and the receiving instances.
Resources aren’t replicated across regions unless done explicitly.
The selection of a Region can be driven by a lot of factors
- Latency – Regions can be selected to be close to the targeted user base to reduce data latency
- Cost – AWS provides the same set of services across all regions, usually, however, the cost would differ from region to region depending upon the cost (due to land, electricity, bandwidth, etc) incurred by Amazon and hence can be cheaper in one region compared to the other
- Legal Compliance – A lot of the countries enforce compliance and regulatory requirements for data to reside within the region itself
- Features – As not all the regions provide all the AWS features and services, the region selection can depend on the Services supported by the region

Recently Launched Regions (2024-2025)

Asia Pacific (Malaysia) – ap-southeast-5 (August 2024)
Canada West (Calgary) – ca-west-1 (2024)
Asia Pacific (Thailand) – ap-southeast-7 (January 2025)
Mexico (Central) – mx-central-1 (January 2025)
Asia Pacific (Taipei) – ap-east-2 (June 2025)
Asia Pacific (New Zealand) – ap-southeast-6 (September 2025)

Availability Zones

Each Region consists of multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones and each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure and is engineered to be highly reliable.
Each Region has at least three isolated Availability Zones (ranging from 3-6).
Each AZ has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
Each AZ is physically isolated from the others so that an uncommon disaster such as fire, or earthquake would only affect a single AZ.
AZs are geographically separated from each other, within the same region, and act as an independent failure zone.
AZs are redundantly connected to multiple tier-1 transit providers.
All AZs in an AWS Region are interconnected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, over fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber providing high-throughput, low-latency networking between AZs.
All traffic between AZs is encrypted.
Multi-AZ feature, distribution of resources across multiple AZs, can be used to distribute instances across multiple AZ to provide High Availability
AWS ensures that resources are distributed across the AZs for a region by independently mapping AZs to identifiers for each account. for e.g. us-east-1 region with us-east-1a AZ might not be the same location as us-east-1a AZ for another account.
To coordinate AZs across accounts, use AZ IDs (e.g., use1-az1), which are unique and consistent identifiers for an Availability Zone across all AWS accounts. AZ IDs can be viewed in the AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) console.

Edge Locations

Edge locations are locations maintained by AWS through a worldwide network of data centers for the distribution of content.
AWS operates 750+ Points of Presence (Edge Locations) and 13 Regional Edge Caches in 100+ cities across 50+ countries.
Edge locations are connected to the AWS Regions through the AWS network backbone – fully redundant, multiple 100GbE parallel fiber that circles the globe and links with tens of thousands of networks for improved origin fetches and dynamic content acceleration.
These locations are located in most of the major cities around the world and are used by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end-user to reduce latency.
Edge Locations are also used by services such as Route 53, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and AWS Global Accelerator.

CloudFront Embedded Points of Presence (Embedded POPs)

Embedded POPs are a new type of CloudFront infrastructure (launched February 2024) deployed directly in the last mile of ISP and mobile network operator (MNO) networks.
CloudFront has 600+ embedded POPs deployed across 200+ cities globally.
Embedded POPs are custom-built to deliver large-scale live-stream video, video-on-demand (VOD), and game downloads.
Embedded POPs provide highly scaled capacity for peak traffic events and enable higher quality streaming closer to end viewers.

AWS Local Zones

AWS Local Zones are infrastructure deployments that extend core AWS services—compute, storage, networking, analytics, AI/ML, and database—to more metros worldwide.
With 30+ locations across six continents, AWS Local Zones deliver the performance, security, and reliability of AWS closer to end users and workloads.
Local Zones allow running highly demanding applications that require single-digit millisecond latencies to the end-users such as media & entertainment content creation, real-time gaming, reservoir simulations, electronic design automation, and machine learning.
Each AWS Local Zone location is an extension of an AWS Region where latency-sensitive applications can be hosted using AWS services such as EC2, VPC, EBS, File Storage, and ELB in geographic proximity to end-users.
AWS Local Zones provide a high-bandwidth, secure connection between local workloads and those running in the AWS Region.
AWS Local Zones help seamlessly connect to the full range of services in the AWS Region such as S3 and DynamoDB through the same APIs and toolsets over AWS’s private and high bandwidth network backbone.
Additional services available in select Local Zones include Amazon FSx, Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, NAT Gateways, AWS Batch, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS.
Local Zones must be explicitly enabled (opted-in) before you can use them.

AWS Local Zones

AWS Dedicated Local Zones

AWS Dedicated Local Zones (launched 2023) are a type of AWS infrastructure that is fully managed by AWS, built for exclusive use by a customer or community, and placed in a customer-specified location or data center.
Dedicated Local Zones are designed to help customers comply with regulatory and digital sovereignty requirements while leveraging the benefits of AWS cloud services.
Dedicated Local Zones offer the same benefits of AWS Local Zones, such as elasticity, scalability, and pay-as-you-go pricing, with added security and governance features.
They can be operated by local AWS personnel and support compute, storage, database, containers, and other services for local processing.
Key use cases include public sector, regulated industries (telecom, finance, healthcare), and organizations with strict data residency requirements.
Dedicated Local Zones support EBS Local Snapshots for data residency within the zone.

AWS Wavelength

AWS Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage services within 5G networks, providing mobile edge computing infrastructure for developing, deploying, and scaling ultra-low-latency applications.
AWS Wavelength helps seamlessly access the breadth of AWS services in the region.
AWS Wavelength brings AWS services to the edge of the 5G network, minimizing the latency to connect to an application from a mobile device.
Application traffic can reach application servers running in Wavelength Zones without leaving the mobile provider’s network, reducing the extra network hops to the Internet that can result in latencies of more than 100 milliseconds.
AWS developers can deploy applications to Wavelength Zones, enabling single-digit millisecond latencies to mobile devices and end-users.
AWS Wavelength helps deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latencies such as game and live video streaming, machine learning inference at the edge, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).
AWS Wavelength also supports data residency, low-latency, and resiliency requirements with sovereign-by-design architecture built on the AWS Nitro System.
AWS Wavelength Zones are available with telecom partners globally, with 30+ Wavelength Zones across multiple countries including the US, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Wavelength Zones are not available in every Region.
Wavelength Zones support EC2 instance families including T3, R5, M5, C5, and G4.

AWS Wavelength Zones

AWS Outposts

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer premises.
Outposts bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility.
Outposts provide the same AWS APIs, tools, and infrastructure across on-premises and AWS cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience.
AWS operates, monitors, and manages this capacity as part of an AWS Region.
Outposts are designed for connected environments and can be used to support workloads that need to remain on-premises due to low latency or local data processing needs.

Second-Generation AWS Outposts Racks (2025)

AWS launched second-generation Outposts racks in April 2025 with significant improvements over first-generation.
Second-generation racks support the latest x86-powered EC2 instances (C7i, M7i, R7i) providing up to 40% better performance compared to C5, M5, R5 instances on first-generation racks.
C8i, M8i, and R8i instances are also available, delivering 20% better performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth.
New features include simplified network scaling and configuration, and accelerated networking instances for ultra-low latency workloads.
Support for multiple local gateway (LGW) routing domains enables network segmentation using both customer-owned IP (CoIP) and direct VPC routing (DVR) modes on the same Outpost.
Satellite Resiliency for AWS Outposts (announced re:Invent 2024) provides a Partner-managed solution for resilient cloud-connected edge computing in remote and geographically dispersed environments.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).

AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.

AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated

Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.

George has launched three EC2 instances inside the US-East-1a zone with his AWS account. Ray has launched two EC2 instances in the US-East-1a zone with his AWS account. Which of the below mentioned statements will help George and Ray understand the availability zone (AZ) concept better?
1. The instances of George and Ray will be running in the same data centre.
2. All the instances of George and Ray can communicate over a private IP with a minimal cost
3. All the instances of George and Ray can communicate over a private IP without any cost
4. us-east-1a region of George and Ray can be different availability zones (Refer link. An Availability Zone is represented by a region code followed by a letter identifier; for example, us-east-1a. To ensure that resources are distributed across the Availability Zones for a region, we independently map Availability Zones to identifiers for each account. For example, your Availability Zone us-east-1a might not be the same location as us-east-1a for another account. To coordinate AZs between accounts, use AZ IDs (e.g., use1-az1) which are consistent across accounts.)
A company needs to deploy an application with ultra-low latency to mobile users on a 5G network. Which AWS infrastructure option should they use?
1. AWS Local Zones
2. AWS Wavelength
3. AWS Outposts
4. AWS Edge Locations
An organization must ensure that their cloud infrastructure is exclusively dedicated to them and located in their own data center to meet strict regulatory requirements. Which AWS solution addresses this need?
1. AWS Local Zones
2. AWS Wavelength
3. AWS Dedicated Local Zones
4. AWS Outposts
Which of the following is the correct minimum number of Availability Zones per AWS Region?
1. 1
2. 2
3. 3
4. 4
A company wants to serve cached content from infrastructure deployed directly within ISP networks to reduce latency for video streaming. Which CloudFront feature supports this?
1. Regional Edge Caches
2. Lambda@Edge
3. CloudFront Embedded Points of Presence (Embedded POPs)
4. CloudFront Functions
To identify and coordinate the same physical Availability Zone location across multiple AWS accounts, which identifier should be used?
1. AZ Name (e.g., us-east-1a)
2. AZ ID (e.g., use1-az1)
3. Region Code (e.g., us-east-1)
4. Account ID