AWS Global Infrastructure Cheat Sheet

Last updated on November 10, 2025

AWS Global Infrastructure Cheat Sheet

Amazon Web Services offers the most extensive global footprint among cloud providers and expands into new regions more quickly than its competitors.

AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure

AWS provides the most extensive global footprint compared to any other cloud provider in the market, and it opens up new regions faster than others.
AWS maintains numerous geographic regions around the globe, from North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.
AWS serves over a million active customers in more than 190 countries.
AWS is able to support this massive workload thanks to its Global Cloud Infrastructure, which consists of the following:
- Availability Zones
- Regions
- Edge Networks
- Local Zones and Wavelength Zones
The AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is the most secure, extensive, and reliable cloud platform in the industry today, offering a wide range of cloud services.
It is the top choice for small and medium enterprises to deploy their application workloads globally and distribute content closer to their end-users with low latency. It provides you with a highly available and fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure where and when you need it.

Data Centers

AWS owns and operates thousands of servers and networking devices that are running and located in various data centers worldwide.
A data center is a physical facility that houses hundreds of computer systems, network devices, and storage appliances.
You can run your applications in two or more data centers to achieve high availability, so if there is an outage in one of the data centers, you still have other servers running in another data center.
A data center can also deliver cached content to your global end-users, improving response times.

At its core, the AWS Global Infrastructure utilizes multiple data centers, which are grouped into Availability Zones, Regions, and Edge Locations. Let’s discuss these components one by one:

AWS Region

An AWS Region comprises multiple Availability Zones and currently has 120 Availability Zones across 38 geographic Regions globally. AWS has various regions available in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and other parts of the globe. Since a single AZ consists of multiple data centers, your system can achieve a higher level of fault-tolerance by running it in two or more AZs. This enables companies to build highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable cloud architectures, rather than running their applications on a single data center.
The Availability Zones of a single AWS Region are typically within hundreds of kilometers or miles of each other.
These AZs (Availability Zones) are still within a specific country to comply with data sovereignty requirements, ensuring that sensitive data is stored only in a designated location.
To improve the durability of your data, you can also replicate it in two or more regions. This is helpful for disaster recovery and backups.

AWS Availability Zones

An Availability Zone, or “AZ” for short, consists of one or more data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity.
The data centers of a single AZ are typically within 100 kilometers or 60 miles of each other. Think of it as a cluster of interconnected data centers in a specific geographic zone that can help your applications become highly available – hence the name, Availability Zone.
AZs are physically separated by a meaningful distance to prevent a single event (like a fire or flood) from impacting all of them.
Since a single AZ consists of one or more data centers, deploying your application to multiple AZs in a single Region enables companies to build a highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable cloud architecture.

AWS Edge Networks

The other component of the AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is the edge networks of Point-of-Presence or PoP.

It consists of Edge Locations and Regional Edge Caches, which enable you to distribute your content with low-latency (pronounced: Laaay-tancy) to your global users. Basically, a PoP functions as an access point that allows two distinct networks to communicate with each other.
By using these global edge networks (over 700+ Points of Presence), a user request doesn’t need to travel far back to your origin to fetch data. The cached contents can quickly be retrieved from regional edge caches that are closer to your end-users. This is also referred to as a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
- For example, you have high-resolution images stored on a server in California. You can cache these media files at an edge location in the Philippines, India, or Singapore to enable your customers in Asia to retrieve these photos more quickly. The images will be loaded promptly because they are fetched from an edge server near your users, rather than being retrieved from their origin server in California.

As mentioned above, the AWS Global infrastructure is built around Regions and Availability Zones (AZs):

Regions provide multiple, physically separated, and isolated Availability Zones, which are connected via low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. Availability Zones offer high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability. It consists of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. An Availability Zone is represented by a region code followed by a letter identifier, such as us-east-1a.

You can visualize the hierarchy of the Availability Zone and AWS Region in this diagram:

An AWS Local Region is a single data center designed to complement an existing AWS Region.
An AWS Local Zone places AWS compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large populations, industries, and IT centers where no AWS Region currently exists. To deliver low-latency content to users worldwide, AWS has established Points of Presence, which are either edge locations or edge caches. These points are used by CloudFront and Lambda@Edge services.
Edge locations are locations that CloudFront uses to cache copies of your content for faster delivery to users at any location.

Specialized Infrastructure Offerings

AWS Local Zone: A specialized infrastructure that places AWS compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large populations, industry, and IT centers to provide ultra-low latency.
AWS Wavelength Zones: Embed AWS compute and storage services within the 5G networks of telecom carriers to deliver ultra-low latency applications to mobile end-users.
AWS Outposts: Enables customers to run AWS infrastructure and services on-premises, providing a truly consistent hybrid cloud experience.

View the Interactive AWS Global Infrastructure Map here.