1.4. AWS Global Infrastructure Overview (Developer Context)

💡 First Principle: Where your code runs determines its latency, availability, and compliance posture — and AWS gives you global infrastructure to control all three.

What happens when a developer ignores infrastructure geography? Users in Tokyo experience 200+ ms of latency hitting a Lambda function in Virginia. A single-AZ deployment goes down when that data center loses power. Compliance auditors reject the application because data leaves the required jurisdiction. Consider a real-world example: an e-commerce app deployed only in us-east-1 serves European customers with 150ms+ latency, losing sales on every slow page load. Without understanding Regions, AZs, and edge locations, these failures are inevitable.

Think of AWS Regions like data center campuses in different cities, and Availability Zones like separate buildings within each campus — connected by high-speed links but physically isolated so a fire in one building doesn't take down the others. Unlike traditional hosting where you pick one data center and hope for the best, AWS lets you architect for global reach and resilience from day one.