1.4. AWS Global Infrastructure Overview (Developer Context)

The First Principle behind AWS's global infrastructure is to provide an inherently resilient, highly available, and scalable foundation for cloud services. For developers, understanding this distributed model is crucial for designing applications that minimize latency for users and remain operational even in the face of localized failures. It's about designing applications with awareness of where data and compute reside geographically.

AWS achieves this through a hierarchical structure:

• Regions: Geographically distinct areas for isolation and fault tolerance.
• Availability Zones (AZs): Isolated data centers within a Region, providing high availability.

Key Purpose of Global Infrastructure for Developers:

• Resilience: Design applications to survive localized failures.
• Low Latency: Deploy applications closer to global users.
• Data Residency: Meet compliance requirements by choosing where data is stored.
• High Availability: Distribute application components across AZs.

Scenario: You are developing a global application that needs to serve users in North America and Europe with minimal latency. Your application stores customer data that needs to comply with data residency regulations in specific geographical areas.

Reflection Question: How does AWS's global infrastructure, particularly the concepts of Regions and Availability Zones, directly influence your application's design for low latency, high availability, and data residency compliance?