Cloud Global Infrastructure
Cloud infrastructure has an extensive global footprint spread across multiple geographic regions.
Let’s try to understand the components of this Global Infrastructure for some of the public clouds.
Some of the core components of the Global Infrastructure are Regions, Availability Zones, Points-of-Presence (PoP) or Edge Locations, and Local Zones or Edge Zones. There are other components as well like Geography in Azure Cloud, Wavelength Zone in AWS, or Edge Computing in Azure.
Regions
Regions are independent physical locations around the world. These consist of clusters of data centers called Availability Zones which are isolated from each other.
Each region is made of at least three Availability Zones.
Regions in Azure have a concept of region pairs, where one region is paired with another region within a data residency boundary and is mainly useful in disaster recovery situations.
Availability Zones
Availability Zones consist of isolated data center clusters with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region.
Availability Zones are connected with high-speed, low-latency networks and are fully redundant. These zones are physically hundreds of kilometers apart.
Thus, applications can be made highly available by setting up infrastructure across two or more availability zones.
The traffic between the availability zones is encrypted.
Points of Presence/ Edge Locations and Regional Edge Locations
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As part of the global network, these locations store content closer to the user base. These provide low-latency data distribution globally by connecting to regions via reliable, low-latency, high-throughput networks handled by the cloud provider, thus acting as the content delivery network.
Local Zones/Edge Zones/Edge Networks
These are small extensions of the Cloud environment where compute is placed in areas far from the Cloud Provider Regions and closer to user locations. These help users run applications with low latency.
Geography in Azure Cloud
Geographies allow customers with specific data residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close.
Wavelength Zone in AWS / Edge Zone with Carriers in Azure
These infrastructure deployments are used by mobile edge computing applications for low latency and high bandwidth requirements. Small extensions of azure are placed in mobile operators’ data centers. They integrate edge-optimized cloud services with mobile operators’ 5G networks, so traffic from 5G devices reaches application servers in these zones without leaving the telecommunications network thus providing high performance and low latency experience to the users.
Azure Private Edge Zones
Gives the capability to run applications, VMs, containers, and network functions side-by-side on-premises on Azure Stack Edge.
Hope this article gave you some information about Cloud Global Infrastructure.
Regards,
Ramya
