Understanding AWS Global Infrastructure

Availability zone

A group of physical data centers closely located form an availability zone. Every AZ is isolated by using separate power and network connectivity in order to minimize the impact of its failure on other AZs.

Region

Each AZ will have atleast one other AZ within the same area usually a city linked by highly resilient and very low latency private Fibre optic connections. This localized grouping of multiple AZs is called a Region. No of services offered in AWS differ from region to region

Example region name and availability zone naming convention

Region name : eu-west-1

Availability zones: eu-west-1a, eu-west-1b and eu-west-1c

Edge location

Edge locations are AWS sites to cache data and reduce latency to end user access by using them as a global content delivery network(CDN). Th users access will be redirected to the nearest edge location where the data is cached instead of the origin servers significantly reducing the latency.

Regional edge cache

A type of edge location sitting between the AWS origin servers and the edge locations with larger cache than each of the individual edge locations. The edge locations can retrieve the data expired from the regional edge caches instead of the origin servers, which would have higher latency.

Further reading

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/