Global Infrastructure

Question 1

Why make a global application?

Answer 1

• A global application is an application deployed in multiple geographies
• On AWS: this could be Regions and / or Edge Locations
• Decreased Latency
• Latency is the time it takes for a network packet to reach a server
• It takes time for a packet from Asia to reach the US
• Deploy your applications closer to your users to decrease latency, better experience
• Disaster Recovery (DR)
• If an AWS region goes down (earthquake, storms, power shutdown, politics)…
• You can fail-over to another region and have your application still working
• A DR plan is important to increase the availability of your application
• Attack protection: distributed global infrastructure is harder to attack

Question 2

Global AWS Infrastructure

Answer 2

• Regions: For deploying applications and infrastructure
• Availability Zones:Made of multiple data centers
• Edge Locations (Points of Presence): for content delivery as close as possible to users

Question 3

Global Applications in AWS

Answer 3

• Global DNS: Route 53
  Great to route users to the closest deployment with least latency
  Great for disaster recovery strategies
• Global Content Delivery Network (CDN): CloudFront
  Replicate part of your application to AWS Edge Locations – decrease latency
  Cache common requests – improved user experience and decreased latency
• S3 Transfer Acceleration
  Accelerate global uploads & downloads into Amazon S3
• AWS Global Accelerator:
  Improve global application availability and performance using the AWS global network
• AWS Health Dashboard – Your Account

Question 4

Amazon Route 53

Answer 4

Route53 is a Managed DNS (Domain Name System)

Route53 routing policy types:

• Simple routing policy – Use for a single resource that performs a given function for your domain, for example, a web server that serves content for the example.com website. You can use simple routing to create records in a private hosted zone.
• Failover routing policy – Use when you want to configure active-passive failover.
• Geolocation routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your users.
• Geoproximity routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another location.
• Latency routing policy – Use when you have resources in multiple AWS Regions and you want to route traffic to the Region that provides the best latency.
• IP-based routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your users, and have the IP addresses that the traffic originates from.
• Multivalue answer routing policy – Use when you want Route 53 to respond to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random.
• Weighted routing policy – Use to route traffic to multiple resources in proportions that you specify. .

Question 5

Amazon CloudFront

Answer 5

• Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Improves read performance, content is cached at the edge
• Improves users experience
• 216 Point of Presence globally (edge locations)
• DDoS protection (because worldwide), integration with Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall

CloudFront origins:
* S3 bucket
For distributing files and caching them at the edge
Enhanced security with CloudFront Origin Access Control (OAC)
OAC is replacing Origin Access Identity (OAI)
CloudFront can be used as an ingress (to upload files to S3)
* Custom Origin (HTTP)
Application Load Balancer
EC2 instance
S3 website (must first enable the bucket as a static S3 website)
Any HTTP backend you want

Question 6

CloudFront vs S3 Cross Region Replication

Answer 6

• CloudFront:
• Global Edge network
• Files are cached for a TTL (maybe a day)
• Great for static content that must be available everywhere

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• S3 Cross Region Replication:
• Must be setup for each region you want replication to happen
• Files are updated in near real-time
• Read only
• Great for dynamic content that needs to be available at low-latency in few regions

Question 7

S3 Transfer Acceleration

Answer 7

• Increase transfer speed by transferring file to an AWS edge location which will forward the data to the S3 bucket in the target region

Question 8

AWS Global Accelerator

Answer 8

• Improve global application availability and performance using the AWS global network
• Leverage the AWS internal network to optimize the route to your application (60% improvement)
• 2 Anycast IPs are created for your application and traffic is sent through Edge Locations
• The Edge locations send the traffic to your application

Question 9

AWS Global Accelerator vs CloudFront

Answer 9

• They both use the AWS global network and its edge locations around the world
• Both services integrate with AWS Shield for DDoS protection.
• CloudFront – Content Delivery Network
  Improves performance for your cacheable content (such as images and videos)
  Content is served at the edge
• Global Accelerator
  No caching, proxying packets at the edge to applications running in one or more AWS Regions.
  Improves performance for a wide range of applications over TCP or UDP
  Good for HTTP use cases that require static IP addresses
  Good for HTTP use cases that required deterministic, fast regional failover

Question 10

AWS Outposts

Answer 10

• Hybrid Cloud: businesses that keep an on- premises infrastructure alongside a cloud infrastructure
• Therefore, two ways of dealing with IT systems:
  One for the AWS cloud (using the AWS console, CLI, and AWS APIs)
  One for their on-premises infrastructure
• AWS Outposts are “server racks” that offers the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs & tools to build your own applications on-premises just as in the cloud
• **AWS will setup and manage “Outposts Racks” ** within your on-premises infrastructure and you can start leveraging AWS services on-premises
• You are responsible for the Outposts Rack physical security
• Benefits:
  Low-latency access to on-premises systems
  Local data processing
  Data residency
  Easier migration from on-premises to the cloud
  Fully managed service
• Some services that work on Outposts:
  Amazon EC2
  Amazon EBS
  Amazon S3
  Amazon EKS
  Amazon ECS
  Amazon RDS
  Amazon EMR

Question 11

AWS WaveLength

Answer 11

• WaveLength Zones are infrastructure deployments embedded within the telecommunications providers’ datacenters at the edge of the 5G networks
• Brings AWS services to the edge of the 5G networks
• Example: EC2, EBS, VPC…
• Ultra-low latency applications through 5G networks
• Traffic doesn’t leave the Communication Service Provider’s (CSP) network
• High-bandwidth and secure connection to the parent AWS Region
• No additional charges or service agreements
• Use cases: Smart Cities, ML-assisted diagnostics, Connected Vehicles, Interactive Live Video Streams, AR/VR, Real-time Gaming, …

Question 12

AWS Local Zones

Answer 12

• Places AWS compute, storage, database, and other selected AWS services closer to end users to run latency-sensitive applications
• Extend your VPC to more locations – “Extension of an AWS Region”
• Compatible with EC2, RDS, ECS, EBS, ElastiCache, Direct Connect …
• Example:
  AWS Region: N. Virginia (us-east-1)
  AWS Local Zones: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Miami, …