AWS Global Infrastructure

AWS Global Infrastructure is the map under everything else in this domain. Every service you launch runs in some physical place, and AWS organizes that hardware into Regions, Availability Zones, and edge locations. Once you know how those pieces fit together, decisions about where to run a workload and how to keep it online stop being guesswork.

The 3 lessons move from structure to strategy. The first lays out Regions and Availability Zones, the second covers edge locations and Amazon CloudFront, and the third shows how to combine zones and Regions into a design that survives failure.

What This Topic Covers

• what an AWS Region is and the 4 factors for choosing one: compliance, latency, pricing, and service availability
• Availability Zones, why each Region has at least 3, and how they stay isolated yet linked by low-latency fiber
• edge locations (points of presence) and how they differ from Regions
• Amazon CloudFront as the AWS content delivery network, including cache hits, origin fetches, and regional edge caches
• high availability and the Multi-AZ pattern that protects against the loss of a single data center
• multi-Region design and how it differs from high availability and disaster recovery
• the active-passive and active-active patterns for serving traffic across Regions

Why It Matters

This topic shows up across the exam, not just in the service questions. A scenario might mention a data residency law, a slow site for users on the other side of the world, or a need to stay online if one Region fails. Each one points straight back to a concept here: pick the right Region, put a CDN in front of your content, or spread the workload across zones and Regions.

It also underpins the services that follow. EC2, S3, RDS, and the rest all live inside this structure, so knowing how Regions, zones, and edge locations work makes the compute, storage, and database lessons easier to place. Get the geography right, and the rest of the domain has somewhere solid to stand.