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1.4.2. Edge Locations and Regional Edge Caches

First Principle: Edge Locations and Regional Edge Caches are global data centers that minimize latency and enhance application performance by serving cached content closer to users.

Edge Locations are data centers operated by AWS that are strategically positioned in highly populated areas around the world. Their primary purpose is to cache content (such as static website files, images, videos) closer to end-users.

Regional Edge Caches are located between AWS Regions and Edge Locations. They have larger caches than individual Edge Locations and act as intermediate caches for content that is not popular enough to stay in an Edge Location, but too popular to retrieve directly from an origin server in an AWS Region.

Key Concepts for Developers:

Scenario: You are developing a global e-commerce website with many static assets (images, CSS, JavaScript). Users worldwide need to experience fast page load times.

Reflection Question: How do Edge Locations and Regional Edge Caches, leveraged by Amazon CloudFront, fundamentally improve user experience and application performance for geographically dispersed applications by minimizing content delivery latency?