What is AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the biggest cloud computing platforms by Amazon. AWS provides more than 200 services, such as databases, computing platforms, storage, content distribution, networking, AI, IoT, etc.
AWS has the largest distributed infrastructure within 30 geographic regions and 96 availability zones. Customers can easily utilize this infrastructure to create highly distributed and fault-tolerant applications and services, serve files from the closest points to the end user.
For most services, AWS provides flexible tiered pricing based on usage, which makes it convenient for both small startups and big enterprises.
Regions
AWS Global Infrastructure comprises 30 United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia regions. Each region has a few availability zones and slightly different pricing for most services. Some of the regions require opt-in and additional verification (for example - GovCloud is a region available for US citizens only).
Also, sometimes particular regions do not support some services, especially regarding newly released services.
Availability Zones
As we mentioned earlier, each region consists of multiple availability zones.
Availability zone (AZ) - is a physical data center, and AWS frequently requires you to specify at least two availability zones to deploy your workloads. They are located close to each other within the region to ensure minimal delays.
The minimal number of availability zones per region is two, and the maximum known number is 6 (For N. Virginia)
Useful links
Here are some links that cover AWS's basic concepts and its global infrastructure:
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