The AWS Global Infrastructure is the physical foundation that supports every service in the cloud. It is built from three layered building blocks: Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations, with more than fifty-four Regions, one hundred seventy Availability Zones, and over four hundred Edge Locations spread across the globe. Together, these components give customers the ability to run workloads close to their users, meet local data residency requirements, and recover quickly from disasters by failing over to other locations.
An AWS Region is a geographic area that contains multiple isolated Availability Zones. Each Region is independent of every other Region, and AWS customers choose a Region based on factors such as latency, compliance, and cost. Within a Region, an Availability Zone, or AZ, is an isolated location made up of one or more data centers. AZs have independent power, cooling, and networking so that a failure in one AZ does not affect the others. By placing resources across multiple AZs in the same Region, applications can achieve high availability and tolerate the loss of an entire data center.
Edge Locations sit at the outermost layer of the AWS network and serve as endpoints for services such as CloudFront and Route 53. They are designed to cache content close to end users, which dramatically reduces latency for web traffic and DNS resolution. While Regions and Availability Zones are best suited for running applications and storing data, Edge Locations exist specifically to accelerate content delivery and improve the user experience. Together, these three layers form a global platform that supports everything from small websites to enterprise-scale, multi-region deployments.