In this post I tried to highlight different physical and virtual connection points which will make you to understand different AWS connections. The reason for this post is, I did not see much documentation which explain difference between these stuff and some things do exists like Transit centers.
What is an Amazon AWS region?
An Amazon AWS region is a physical location spread across globe to host your data to reduce latency. In each region there will be at least two availability zones for fault tolerance.
There are total 11 AWS regions at this point of writing this post and they are
| Sl.No | CodeName | Location |
| 1 | ap-northeast-1 | Asia Pacific (Tokyo) |
| 2 | ap-southeast-1 | Asia Pacific (Singapore) |
| 3 | ap-southeast-2 | Asia Pacific (Sydney) |
| 4 | eu-central-1 | EU (Frankfurt) |
| 5 | eu-west-1 | EU (Ireland) |
| 6 | sa-east-1 | South America (Sao Paulo) |
| 7 | us-east-1 | US East (N. Virginia) |
| 8 | us-west-1 | US West (N. California) |
| 9 | us-west-2 | US West (Oregon) |
| 10 | ? | China (Beijing) Region |
| 11 | us-gov-west | Gov Cloud(Some where in Oregon state of the Northwestern US) Region |
What is an Amazon AWS Availability zone?
An AZ is a combination of one or more data centers in a given region. These datacenters need not to be separated by multiple kilometers physically but by meters with in a physical compound which are completely isolated from each other failure such as power, network in a given AZ. It is a logical grouping of data centers in a given region for service high availability. These AZs in a region are connected with direct Fiber optic links which have capacity of around 25Tbps bandwidth and a latency of 2ms to 1ms. Below list shows availability zones in given regions.
| Sl.No | CodeName | Location | No of AZ | List of AZs |
| 1 | ap-northeast-1 | Asia Pacific (Tokyo) | 3 | ap-northeast-1a, ap-northeast-1b, ap-northeast-1c |
| 2 | ap-southeast-1 | Asia Pacific (Singapore) | 2 | ap-southeast-1a, ap-southeast-1b |
| 3 | ap-southeast-2 | Asia Pacific (Sydney) | 2 | ap-southeast-2a, ap-southeast-2b |
| 4 | eu-central-1 | EU (Frankfurt) | 2 | eu-central-1a, eu-central-1b |
| 5 | eu-west-1 | EU (Ireland) | 3 | eu-west-1a, eu-west-1b, eu-west-1c |
| 6 | sa-east-1 | South America (Sao Paulo) | 2 | sa-east-1a, sa-east-1b |
| 7 | us-east-1 | US East (N. Virginia) | 5 | us-east-1a, us-east-1b, us-east-1c, us-east-1d, us-east-1e |
| 8 | us-west-1 | US West (N. California) | 3 | us-west-1a, us-west-1b, us-west-1c |
| 9 | us-west-2 | US West (Oregon) | 3 | us-west-2a, us-west-2b, us-west-2c |
| 10 | ? | China (Beijing) Region | 1 | ? |
| 11 | us-gov-west | Gov Cloud(the Northwestern US) Region | 2 | us-gov-west-1, us-gov-west-2 |
What is an Amazon AWS Datacenter?
A datacenter is a location where actual physical data resides. A data center typically have 50000 to 80000 physical servers. A single or couple of data centers are clubbed in to one AZ. Its really hard to get how many datacenters Amazon operates, if you know a genuine link, please post it in comments section, I will update the post with details. But we found some interesting map for you on DC’s http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/aws-datacenters.
What is an Amazon AWS Edge location?
An edge location is where end users access services located at AWS. They are located in most of the major cities around the world and are specifically used by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end user to reduce latency. It is like frontend for the service we access which are located in AWS cloud. Below are some of the Edge locations as of this writing.
| Sl.No | Region CodeName | Location | No of AZ | List of AZs | Edge Locations | No of EL |
| 1 | ap-northeast-1 | Asia Pacific (Tokyo) | 3 | ap-northeast-1a, ap-northeast-1b, ap-northeast-1c | Chennai, India, Hong Kong, China (2), Melbourne, Australia, Mumbai, India,Osaka, Japan, Seoul, K orea, Singapore (2), Manila, The Philippines, Taipei, Taiwan, Tokyo, Japan (2), Sydney, Australia, | 14 |
| 2 | ap-southeast-1 | Asia Pacific (Singapore) | 2 | ap-southeast-1a, ap-southeast-1b | ||
| 3 | ap-southeast-2 | Asia Pacific (Sydney) | 2 | ap-southeast-2a, ap-southeast-2b | ||
| 4 | eu-central-1 | EU (Frankfurt) | 2 | eu-central-1a, eu-central-1b | Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2), Dublin, Ireland, Frankfurt, Germany (3), London, England (3), Madrid, Spain, Marseille, France, Milan, Italy, Paris, France (2), Stockholm, Sweden, and Warsaw, Poland | 16 |
| 5 | eu-west-1 | EU (Ireland) | 3 | eu-west-1a, eu-west-1b, | ||
| 6 | sa-east-1 | South America (Sao Paulo) | 2 | sa-east-1a, sa-east-1b | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, São Paulo, Brazil | 2 |
| 7
| us-east-1 | US East (N. Virginia) | 5 | us-east-1a, us-east-1b, us-east-1c, us-east-1e | Ashburn, VA (3), Atlanta, GA,Dallas/Fort Worth, TX (2), Hayward, CA, Jacksonville, FL, Angeles, CA (2), New York, NY (3), Newark, NJ, Palo Alto, CA,Miami, FL, San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, South Bend, IN, St. Louis, MO | 20 |
| 8 | us-west-1 | US West (N. California) | 3 | us-west-1a, us-west-1b, us-west-1c | ||
| 9 | us-west-2 | US West (Oregon) | 3 | us-west-2a, us-west-2b, us-west-2c | ||
| 10 | ? | China (Beijing) Region | 1 | ? | ? | ? |
| 11 | us-gov-west | Gov Cloud(Some where in Oregon state of the Northwestern US) Region | 2 | us-gov-west-1, us-gov-west-2 | ? | ? |
There are other Amazon AWS physical locations, access points etc without them this post is half explained. Below are some services you should know.
- Amazon AWS direct connect
- Amazon AWS endpoints
- Transit Centers
What is an Amazon AWS direct connect?
An Amazon AWS direct connect is a service offered by Amazon for a dedicated optical fiber cable from your office premises to Amazon AWS cloud where you run your applications. The advantage of this service is of three folds, one is to provide adequate and dedicated bandwidth to your services located in AWS, second one is to reduce latency from your network to AWS network and other is to provide private connectivity to your services in AWS from your office network. We should relise that this connection is not part of Internet.
What is AWS endpoints?
An AWS endpoint is a URL we try to connect to our AWS web console to access our services to configure them.
What is Amazon AWS transit centers?
I feel this AWS transit centers are least documented service in AWS documentation which we discussed so far. A transit center is defined as a connection point between actual data center to customers. These transit centers are highly available connection centers which are independent of each other in an region which are directly connected to all the available AZs in a given region.
What is difference between AWS endpoints and an AWS Edge locations?
There is a relation between AWS endpoints and AWS edge location. AWS endpoints are used to connect to AWS web console service to configure aws services such as EC2, S3 etc by a company or engineers where as AWS Edge location is where this service is served to the clients.
What to know about physical location of AWS services/DC globally on a map? Then below map is for you.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?msa=0&mid=z8tAG_iMI0RE.kBLn8p8h4GGw
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
Still have question on Regions, AZs, Edge locations, DC’s? See below video for better understanding about them
A good video on DCs, AZs, Region, Transit centers, HA etc.
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