Summary

AWS operates in all sorts of different areas around the world called Regions.
Each region is isolated from every other region. No data goes in and out of your environment in that region without you explicitly granting permission to that data to be moved.
Criterias (factors) for choosing the region :

– Compliance (with data governance and legal requirements)
for example, if company requires all of its data to reside within the boundaries of the UK, you would choose the London Region

– Proximity to your customers
for example, your company is based in Washington, DC, and many of your customers live in Singapore – you might consider to run applications from the Singapore Region

– Available services within a Region
for example, developers want to build an application that uses Amazon Braket (AWS quantum computing platform). AWS Braket is not yet available in every region and it narrows the choice

– Pricing
cost of services can vary from region to region

Availability Zones

Each region consists of multiple data centers. AWS calls a single data center or a group of data centers Availability Zone. Each Availability Zone is a data center or a group of data centers with redundant power, networking and connectivity. Each AWS Region consists of multiple isolated and physically separated Availability Zones. Each region should have at least 2 Availability Zones. Availability Zones should be placed as far apart from each other as possible.
Some AWS services (like Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)) run on a regional level.

Edge locations all around the world are used by Amazon Cloudfront to help accelerate communication with users. Edge locations are separate from regions. AWS Edge Locations run more than just Amazon Cloudfront. They run a DNS service Amazon 53.

AWS Outposts

AWS can install a fully operational mini region right inside your own data center that is owned and operated by AWS. Used for specific cases when tasks can be resolved only by staying in your own building.

In AWS, everything is an API call. APIs are pre-determined way to interact with AWS services, and they can be called to provision, configure and manage your AWS resources. Interacting with AWS services can be done by using
– AWS management console
– AWS Command Line interface
– AWS Software Development Kits
– Various other tools (like AWS Cloud Formation that is used to build an environment by writing lines of code instead of using AWS Management Console to individually provision resources, CloudFormation is a declarative tool)

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service that helps you provision EC2 based environments. Elastic Beanstalk deploys the resources necessary to perform the following tasks :
– Adjust capacity
– Load balancing
– Automatic scaling
– Application health monitoring