AWS Documentation Links

https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/

https://aws.amazon.com/types-of-cloud-computing/?WICC-N=tile&tile=types_of_cloud

https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/?pg=TOCC

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/?pg=WIAWS

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/localzones/

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/?nc=sn&loc=1

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AWS notes:

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-
as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and
servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and
databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services
(AWS).

Who is using cloud computing?

Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases,
such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing,
big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications. For example, healthcare companies are
using the cloud to develop more personalized treatments for patients. Financial services companies
are using the cloud to power real-time fraud detection and prevention. And video game makers are
using the cloud to deliver online games to millions of players around the world.

Benefits of cloud computing

Agility

The cloud gives you easy access to a broad range of technologies so that you can
innovate faster and build nearly anything that you can imagine. You can quickly spin up
resources as you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage,
and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and
much more.

You can deploy technology services in a matter of minutes, and get from idea to
implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This gives you the
freedom to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences, and
transform your business.

Elasticity

With cloud computing, you don’t have to over-provision resources up front to handle
peak levels of business activity in the future. Instead, you provision the amount of
resources that you actually need. You can scale these resources up or down to instantly
to grow and shrink capacity as your business needs change.
Cost savings

The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical
servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable
expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself because of the
economies of scale.

Deploy globally in minutes

With the cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in
minutes. For example, AWS has infrastructure all over the world, so you can deploy
your application in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. Putting applications
in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience.

Types of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is providing developers and IT departments with the ability to focus on what
matters most and avoid undifferentiated work like procurement, maintenance, and capacity planning.
As cloud computing has grown in popularity, several different models and deployment strategies
have emerged to help meet specific needs of different users. Each type of cloud service, and
deployment method, provides you with different levels of control, flexibility, and management.
Understanding the differences between Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and
Software as a Service, as well as what deployment strategies you can use, can help you decide
what set of services is right for your needs.

Cloud Computing Models

There are three main models for cloud computing. Each model represents a different part of the
cloud computing stack.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Infrastructure as a Service, sometimes abbreviated as IaaS, contains the basic building blocks for
cloud IT and typically provide access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated
hardware), and data storage space. Infrastructure as a Service provides you with the highest level of
flexibility and management control over your IT resources and is most similar to existing IT
resources that many IT departments and developers are familiar with today.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platforms as a service remove the need for organizations to manage the underlying infrastructure
(usually hardware and operating systems) and allow you to focus on the deployment and
management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about
resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other
undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service provides you with a completed product that is run and managed by the
service provider. In most cases, people referring to Software as a Service are referring to end-user
applications. With a SaaS offering you do not have to think about how the service is maintained or
how the underlying infrastructure is managed; you only need to think about how you will use that
particular piece software. A common example of a SaaS application is web-based email where you
can send and receive email without having to manage feature additions to the email product or
maintaining the servers and operating systems that the email program is running on.

Types of Cloud Computing Models

Cloud Computing Deployment Models
Cloud
A cloud-based application is fully deployed in the cloud and all parts of the application run in the
cloud. Applications in the cloud have either been created in the cloud or have been migrated from an
existing infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing. Cloud-based
applications can be built on low-level infrastructure pieces or can use higher level services that
provide abstraction from the management, architecting, and scaling requirements of core
infrastructure.

Hybrid
A hybrid deployment is a way to connect infrastructure and applications between cloud-based
resources and existing resources that are not located in the cloud. The most common method of
hybrid deployment is between the cloud and existing on-premises infrastructure to extend, and grow,
an organization's infrastructure into the cloud while connecting cloud resources to internal system.
For more information on how AWS can help you with your hybrid deployment, please visit our hybrid
page.

On-premises
Deploying resources on-premises, using virtualization and resource management tools, is
sometimes called “private cloud”. On-premises deployment does not provide many of the benefits of
cloud computing but is sometimes sought for its ability to provide dedicated resources. In most
cases this deployment model is the same as legacy IT infrastructure while using application
management and virtualization technologies to try and increase resource utilization.
 Helping Customers innovate Faster

Seeking a Better Customer Experience

Live Nation is the global leader in live entertainment that produces concerts, sells tickets, and
connects brands to music. In 2016 Live Nation announced it was moving its global IT infrastructure
to AWS in an effort to deliver better experiences to its customers.
An Easy Migration
The company moved 118 applications and 668 servers to AWS within 17 months without adding
headcount or budget.
Business-Changing Benefits
By moving to AWS, Live Nation has moved from troubleshooting hardware to delivering on
innovative ideas that serve its customers better. Since implementation, Live Nation realized a 58-
percent reduction in total cost of ownership, supported 10 times as many projects with the same
staff, and saw a 99-percent improvement in application availability.

Cloud services
AWS has more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud
provider, including compute, storage, databases, networking, data lakes and analytics,
machine learning and artificial intelligence, IoT, security, and much more.
Cloud Products

Cloud Products
Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global cloud-based products
including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer
tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise applications. These services help
organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale. AWS is trusted by the largest
enterprises and the hottest start-ups to power a wide variety of workloads including:
web and mobile applications, game development, data processing and warehousing,
storage, archive, and many others.
 Cloud solutions
AWS provides a comprehensive portfolio of solutions that help you solve common problems and
build faster using the AWS platform. Every AWS Solution comes with detailed architecture, a
deployment guide, and instructions for both automated and manual deployment.
Vetted Technical reference implementation designed to help you solve common problems and
build faster

common problems and build faster

Explore the AWS Solutions Portfolio

AWS Solutions help you solve common problems and build faster using the AWS platform. All AWS
Solutions are vetted by AWS architects and are designed to be operationally effective, reliable,
secure, and cost effective. Every AWS Solution comes with detailed architecture, a deployment
guide, and instructions for both automated and manual deployment.

What is AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud
platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of
customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government
agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

The leading cloud platform

Most functionality
AWS has significantly more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud
provider–from infrastructure technologies like compute, storage, and databases–to emerging
technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes and analytics, and
Internet of Things. This makes it faster, easier, and more cost effective to move your existing
applications to the cloud and build nearly anything you can imagine.

AWS also has the deepest functionality within those services. For example, AWS offers the widest
variety of databases that are purpose-built for different types of applications so you can choose the
right tool for the job to get the best cost and performance.

Largest community of customers and partners

AWS has the largest and most dynamic community, with millions of active customers and tens of
thousands of partners globally. Customers across virtually every industry and of every size, including
startups, enterprises, and public sector organizations, are running every imaginable use case on
AWS. The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes thousands of systems integrators who specialize in
AWS services and tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) who adapt their
technology to work on AWS.
Most secure
AWS is architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today.
Our core infrastructure is built to satisfy the security requirements for the military, global banks, and
other high-sensitivity organizations. This is backed by a deep set of cloud security tools, with 230
security, compliance, and governance services and features. AWS supports 90 security standards
and compliance certifications, and all 117 AWS services that store customer data offer the ability to
encrypt that data.

Fastest pace of innovation

With AWS, you can leverage the latest technologies to experiment and innovate more quickly. We
are continually accelerating our pace of innovation to invent entirely new technologies you can use
to transform your business. For example, in 2014, AWS pioneered the serverless computing space
with the launch of AWS Lambda, which lets developers run their code without provisioning or
managing servers. And AWS built Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning service
that empowers everyday developers and scientists to use machine learning–without any previous
experience.
Most proven operational expertise
AWS has unmatched experience, maturity, reliability, security, and performance that you can
depend upon for your most important applications. For over 13 years, AWS has been delivering
cloud services to millions of customers around the world running a wide variety of use cases. AWS
has the most operational experience, at greater scale, of any cloud provider.

Global network of AWS Regions

AWS has the most extensive global cloud infrastructure. No other cloud provider offers as many
Regions with multiple Availability Zones connected by low latency, high throughput, and highly
redundant networking. AWS has 69 Availability Zones within 22 geographic regions around the
world, and has announced plans for 16 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in
Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Africa, and Spain. The AWS Region/Availability Zone model has been
recognized by Gartner as the recommended approach for running enterprise applications that
require high availability.
 Why Cloud Infrastructure Matters
The AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is the most secure, extensive, and reliable Cloud Computing
environment anywhere, on and off the planet. Whether you need to deploy your application
workloads across the globe in a single click, or you want to build and deploy specific applications
closer to your end-users with single-digit millisecond latency, AWS provides you the cloud
infrastructure where and when you need it.

With millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally, AWS has the largest
and most dynamic ecosystem. Customers across virtually every industry and of every size, including
start-ups, enterprises, and public sector organizations, are running every imaginable use case on
AWS.

22 Launched Regions
Each with multiple Availability Zones (AZ’s)
5 Announced Regions
69 Availability Zones
1 Local Zone
For ultralow latency applications
2x More Regions
With multiple AZ’s than the next largest cloud provider
245 Countries and Territories Served
97 Direct Connect Locations
216 Points of Presence
205 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches
Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide (2019)

Customers are increasingly choosing AWS to host their cloud-based infrastructure and realize
increased performance, security, reliability, and scale wherever they go. For the ninth year in a row,
AWS is evaluated as a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service,
Worldwide, with the highest score in both axes of measurement— Ability to Execute and
Completeness of Vision— among the top 6 vendors in the industry.
AWS Global Infrastructure Map
AWS now spans 69 Availability Zones within 22 geographic regions around the world, and has
announced plans for sixteen more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy,
Japan, South Africa, and Spain.

Benefits

Security

Security at AWS starts with our core infrastructure. Custom-built for the cloud and designed to meet
the most stringent security requirements in the world, our infrastructure is monitored 24/7 to help
ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data. All data flowing across the AWS
global network that interconnects our datacenters and Regions is automatically encrypted at the
physical layer before it leaves our secured facilities. You can build on the most secure global
infrastructure, knowing you always control your data, including the ability to encrypt it, move it, and
manage retention at any time.

Availability

AWS delivers the highest network availability of any cloud provider, with 7x fewer down time hours
than the next largest cloud provider.* Each region is fully isolated and comprised of multiple AZ’s,
which are fully isolated partitions of our infrastructure. To better isolate any issues and achieve high
availability, you can partition applications across multiple AZ’s in the same region. AZ’s are designed
for physical redundancy and provide resilience, enabling uninterrupted performance, even in the
event of power outages, Internet downtime, floods, and other natural disasters.

Performance

The AWS Global Infrastructure is built for performance. AWS Regions offer low latency, low packet
loss, and high overall network quality. This is achieved with a fully redundant 100 GbE fiber network
backbone, often providing many terabits of capacity between Regions. AWS Local Zones and AWS
Wavelength, with our telco providers, provide performance for applications that require single-digit
millisecond latencies by delivering AWS infrastructure and services closer to end-users and 5G
connected devices. Whatever your application needs, you can quickly spin up resources as you
need them, deploying hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes.

Global Footprint

AWS has the largest global infrastructure footprint of any provider, and this footprint is constantly
increasing at a significant rate. When deploying your applications and workloads to the cloud, you
have the flexibility in selecting a technology infrastructure that is closest to your primary target of
users. You can run your workloads on the cloud that delivers the best support for the broadest set of
applications, even those with the highest throughput and lowest latency requirements. And If your
data lives off this planet, you can use AWS Ground Station, which provides satellite antennas in
close proximity to AWS infrastructure Regions.

Scalability

The AWS Global Infrastructure enables companies to be extremely flexible and take advantage of
the conceptually infinite scalability of the cloud. Customers used to over provision to ensure they had
enough capacity to handle their business operations at the peak level of activity. Now, they can
provision the amount of resources that they actually need, knowing they can instantly scale up or
down along with the needs of their business, which also reduces cost and improves the customer’s
ability to meet their user’s demands. Companies can quickly spin up resources as they need them,
deploying hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes.

Flexibility

The AWS Global Infrastructure gives you the flexibility of choosing how and where you want to run
your workloads, and when you do you are using the same network, control plane, API’s, and AWS
services. If you would like to run your applications globally you can choose from any of the AWS
Regions and AZ’s. If you need to run your applications with single-digit millisecond latencies to
mobile devices and end-users you can choose AWS Local Zones or AWS Wavelength. Or if you
would like to run your applications on-premises you can choose AWS Outposts.

Regions
AWS has the concept of a Region, which is a physical location around the world where we
cluster data centers. We call each group of logical data centers an Availability Zone. Each AWS
Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate AZ's within a geographic area.
Unlike other cloud providers, who often define a region as a single data center, the multiple AZ
design of every AWS Region offers advantages for customers. Each AZ has independent power,
cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS
customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple AZ's to
achieve even greater fault-tolerance. AWS infrastructure Regions meet the highest levels of
security, compliance, and data protection.

AWS provides a more extensive global footprint than any other cloud provider, and to support its
global footprint and ensure customers are served across the world, AWS opens new Regions
rapidly. AWS maintains multiple geographic Regions, including Regions in North America,
South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.

Availability Zones

An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power,
networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. AZ’s give customers the ability to operate
production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable
than would be possible from a single data center. All AZ’s in an AWS Region are interconnected
with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, over fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber
providing high-throughput, low-latency networking between AZ’s. All traffic between AZ’s is
encrypted. The network performance is sufficient to accomplish synchronous replication
between AZ’s. AZ’s make partitioning applications for high availability easy. If an application is
partitioned across AZ’s, companies are better isolated and protected from issues such as power
outages, lightning strikes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and more. AZ’s are physically separated by a
meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60
miles) of each other.

AWS Local Zones

AWS Local Zones place compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services closer to
end-users. With AWS Local Zones, you can easily run highly-demanding applications that
require single-digit millisecond latencies to your end-users such as media & entertainment
content creation, real-time gaming, reservoir simulations, electronic design automation, and
machine learning.

Each AWS Local Zone location is an extension of an AWS Region where you can run your
latency sensitive applications using AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud,
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon File Storage, and Amazon
Elastic Load Balancing in geographic proximity to end-users. AWS Local Zones provide a high-
bandwidth, secure connection between local workloads and those running in the AWS Region,
allowing you to seamlessly connect to the full range of in-region services through the same APIs
and tool sets.

AWS Wavelength

AWS Wavelength enables developers to build applications that deliver single-digit millisecond
latencies to mobile devices and end-users. AWS developers can deploy their applications to
Wavelength Zones, AWS infrastructure deployments that embed AWS compute and storage
services within the telecommunications providers’ datacenters at the edge of the 5G networks,
and seamlessly access the breadth of AWS services in the region. This enables developers to
deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latencies such as game and live video
streaming, machine learning inference at the edge, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).
AWS Wavelength brings AWS services to the edge of the 5G network, minimizing the latency to
connect to an application from a mobile device. Application traffic can reach application servers
running in Wavelength Zones without leaving the mobile provider’s network. This reduces the
extra network hops to the Internet that can result in latencies of more than 100 milliseconds,
preventing customers from taking full advantage of the bandwidth and latency advancements of
5G.

AWS Outposts

AWS Outposts bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any
data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. You can use the same AWS APIs, tools,
and infrastructure across on-premises and the AWS cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid
experience. AWS Outposts is designed for connected environments and can be used to support
workloads that need to remain on-premises due to low latency or local data processing needs.

Services

AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products including compute, storage, database,
analytics, networking, machine learning and AI, mobile, developer tools, IoT, security, enterprise
applications, and much more. Our general policy is to deliver AWS services, features and
instance types to all AWS Regions within 12 months of general availability, based on a variety
of factors such as customer demand, latency, data sovereignty and other factors. Customers can
share their interest for local region delivery, request service roadmap information, or gain insight
on service interdependency (under NDA) by contacting your AWS sales representative. Due to
the nature of the service, some AWS services are delivered globally rather than regionally, such
as Amazon Route 53, Amazon Chime, Amazon WorkDocs, Amazon WorkMail, Amazon
WorkSpaces, Amazon WorkLink.

High Availability

Unlike other technology infrastructure providers, each AWS Region has multiple AZ’s. As
we’ve learned from running the leading cloud infrastructure technology platform since 2006,
customers who care about the availability and performance of their applications want to deploy
these applications across multiple AZ’s in the same region for fault tolerance and low latency.
AZ’s are connected to each other with fast, private fiber-optic networking, enabling you to easily
architect applications that automatically fail-over between AZ’s without interruption.

The AWS control plane (including APIs) and AWS Management Console are distributed across
AWS Regions and utilize a multi-AZ architecture within each region to deliver resilience and
ensure continuous availability. This ensures that customers avoid having a critical service
dependency on a single data center. AWS can conduct maintenance activities without making
any critical service temporarily unavailable to any customer.

Improving Continuity

In addition to replicating applications and data across multiple data centers in the same Region
using AZ’s, you can also choose to increase redundancy and fault tolerance further by replicating
data across AWS Regions. You can do this by using both private, high speed networking and
public internet connections to provide an additional layer of business continuity, or to provide
low latency access across the globe.

Compliance and Data Residency

If you have data residency requirements, you can choose the AWS Region that is in close
proximity to your desired location. You retain complete control and ownership over the region in
which your data is physically located, making it easy to meet regional compliance and data
residency requirements. You can rest assured knowing that not only does AWS comply with
Global Data Protection and Regulation (GDPR), but we have services and tools to enable you to
build GDPR-compliant infrastructure on top of AWS. Organizations from startups to enterprises
and the public sector have access to infrastructure in their country to leverage advanced
technologies including analytics, artificial Intelligence, database, Internet of Things (IoT),
machine learning, mobile services, serverless, and more to drive innovation.

AWS Local Zones

Run latency sensitive applications closer to end-users

AWS Local Zones are a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute,
storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers
where no AWS Region exists today. With AWS Local Zones, you can easily run latency-sensitive
portions of applications local to end-users and resources in a specific geography, delivering single-
digit millisecond latency for use cases such as media & entertainment content creation, real-time
gaming, reservoir simulations, electronic design automation, and machine learning.

Each AWS Local Zone location is an extension of an AWS Region where you can run your latency-
sensitive applications using AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Virtual
Private Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon FSx, and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing in
geographic proximity to end-users. AWS Local Zones provide a high-bandwidth, secure connection
between local workloads and those running in the AWS Region, allowing you to seamlessly connect
back to your other workloads running in AWS and to the full range of in-region services through the
same APIs and tool sets.

AWS Local Zones are managed and supported by AWS, bringing you all of the elasticity, scalability,
and security benefits of the cloud. With AWS Local Zones, you can easily build and deploy latency-
sensitive applications closer to your end-users using a consistent set of AWS services, scale up or
scale down, and pay only for the resources that you use.

The Los Angeles AWS Local Zone is generally available by invitation today and you can expect
more Local Zones to come.

Get started with AWS Local Zones here.

Benefits

Low latency to local end-users

AWS Local Zones place compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services closer to end-
users to enable you to open up new possibilities and deliver innovative applications and services
that require single-digit millisecond latencies for more end-users.
Consistent AWS experience

AWS Local Zones enable you to use the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tool sets that
you are familiar with in the cloud. Applications have fast, secure, and seamless access to the full
breadth of services in the parent region.

Flexible and scalable

AWS Local Zones are part of AWS Global Infrastructure, thereby offering the benefits AWS Regions
offer today, like elasticity, availability, selection, and low pay-as-you-go pricing. You can start small
and scale as your needs grow, and pay only for the resources that you use.

How it works

Use cases

Media & Entertainment Content Creation

Run latency-sensitive workloads, such as live production, video editing, and graphics-intensive
virtual workstations for artists in geographic proximity to AWS Local Zones. Accelerate content
creation by getting rid of latency limitations and capacity constraints while improving security and
operational efficiency.

Real-time Multiplayer Gaming

Deploy latency-sensitive game servers in AWS Local Zones to run real-time multiplayer game
sessions and maintain a reliable gameplay experience. With AWS Local Zones, you deploy your
game servers closer to your players than ever before for a real-time and interactive in-game
experience.

Reservoir Simulations

Use low-latency capabilities to expand exploration opportunities and reduce costs by putting
engineering workloads in AWS Local Zones. Improve drilling hit rates and optimize decision making
by enabling underground reservoir simulations in the cloud.
Electronic Design Automation

Innovate faster by allowing chip designers and verification engineers to solve complex, compute-
intensive, and latency-sensitive problems using application and desktop streaming services in AWS
Local Zones.

Machine Learning

Easily host and train models continuously for high performance low-latency inferencing. Work with
your data, experiment with algorithms, and visualize your output faster in AWS Local Zones.

Available locations
The first AWS Local Zone is available in Los Angeles, CA. The Los Angeles Local Zone is
associated with US West (Oregon) Region. For API calls, CLI commands, and the AWS
Management Console, use 'us-west-2' or US West (Oregon).

AWS Local Zones features

AWS Local Zones are a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment that place compute, storage,
database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers, enabling you
to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users.

Compute and Storage

AWS Local Zones offer a selection of general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized,
accelerated computing, and storage optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance
families (including T3, C5, M5, R5, R5d, I3en, G4) as well as Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
volumes such as General Purpose SSD (gp2) and Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) for persistent local
block storage. AWS Local Zones also offers two file services locally: Amazon FSx for Lustre (a high-
performance POSIX file system) and AWS FSx for Windows File Server (native Microsoft Windows
file system).

Networking
Seamlessly extend Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in an account to span across Availability
Zones and AWS Local Zones. You can create a subnet in your regional VPC and associate it with a
Local Zone just as you associate subnets with an Availability Zone in an AWS Region to extend all
VPC features including Security Groups, Network ACLs, and Route Tables to a Local Zone.

Internet & Direct Connect

Local Zones have local internet ingress and egress to reduce latency. Local Zones also support
AWS Direct Connect, giving you the opportunity to route your traffic over a private network
connection.
AWS Services
You can use AWS Local Zones to run various AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon FSx, and Amazon
Elastic Load Balancing in geographic proximity to your end users, with more services to be added in
the future.

Access Regional Services

AWS Local Zones allow you to seamlessly connect to the full range of services in the AWS Region
such as Amazon S3 and DynamoDB through the same APIs and tool sets over AWS’s private and
high bandwidth network backbone.

AWS Tools
AWS tools such as AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and others can be
used to run and manage workloads as they do for Cloud workloads today.

Amazon CloudFront
Fast, highly secure and programmable content delivery network (CDN)

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data,
videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all
within a developer-friendly environment. CloudFront is integrated with AWS – both physical
locations that are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as other AWS
services. CloudFront works seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation,
Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, and
Lambda@Edge to run custom code closer to customers’ users and to customize the user
experience. Lastly, if you use AWS origins such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 or Elastic Load
Balancing, you don’t pay for any data transferred between these services and CloudFront.

You can get started with the Content Delivery Network in minutes, using the same AWS tools
that you're already familiar with: APIs, AWS Management Console, AWS CloudFormation, CLIs,
and SDKs. Amazon's CDN offers a simple, pay-as-you-go pricing model with no upfront fees or
required long-term contracts, and support for the CDN is included in your existing AWS Support
subscription.
Benefits

Fast & global

The Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) is massively scaled and globally
distributed. The CloudFront network has 216 points of presence (PoPs), and leverages the highly-
resilient Amazon backbone network for superior performance and availability for your end users.

Security at the Edge

Amazon CloudFront is a highly-secure CDN that provides both network and application level
protection. Your traffic and applications benefit through a variety of built-in protections such as AWS
Shield Standard, at no additional cost. You can also use configurable features such as AWS
Certificate Manager (ACM) to create and manage custom SSL certificates at no extra cost.

Highly programmable

Amazon CloudFront features can be customized for your specific application

requirements. Lambda@Edge functions, triggered by CloudFront events, extend your custom code
across AWS locations worldwide, allowing you to move even complex application logic closer to your
end users to improve responsiveness. The CDN also supports integrations with other tools and
automation interfaces for today's DevOps and CI/CD environments by using native APIs or AWS
tools.

Deep integration with AWS

Amazon CloudFront is integrated with AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Elastic
Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, and AWS Elemental Media Services . They are all accessible
via the same console and all features in the CDN can be programmatically configured by using APIs
or the AWS Management Console.

Use cases

Static asset caching

Amazon CloudFront can speed up the delivery of your static content (e.g., images, style sheets,
JavaScript, etc.) to viewers across the globe. The Content Delivery Network (CDN) offers a multi-tier
cache by default, with regional Edge caches that improve latency and lower the load on your origin
servers when the object is not already cached at the Edge. Caching static content gives you the
performance and scale you need to give your viewers a fast and reliable experience when visiting
your website.

Live & on-demand video streaming

The Amazon CloudFront CDN offers multiple options for streaming your media – both pre-recorded
files and live events – at sustained, high throughput required for 4K delivery to global viewers.
For on-demand streaming, you can use CloudFront for multi-bitrate adaptive streaming in Microsoft
Smooth, HLS, HDS, or MPEG-DASH formats to any device. To broadcast a live stream, you can use
the Content Delivery Network to cache the media fragments at the edge and collapse multiple
requests for the manifest file to reduce load to your origin.

Security

CloudFront integrates seamlessly with AWS Shield for Layer 3/4 DDoS mitigation and AWS WAF for
Layer 7 protection. In addition, CloudFront negotiates TLS connections with the highest security
ciphers, and authenticates viewers with signed URLs. You can also use our advanced feature Field-
Level Encryption to protect most sensitive data throughout your enterprise, so the information can
only be viewed by certain components and services in your application stack. CloudFront also
integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access, with AWS CloudTrail
to log access to your configuration, and with Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) for automated
certificate renewals.

Customizable content delivery with Lambda@Edge

With Lambda@Edge you can easily run your code across AWS locations globally, allowing you to
respond to your end users at the lowest latency and allowing you to personalize content. For
example, you can deliver unique content based on attributes of your visitors, generate custom
responses, or conduct A/B testing with your own custom code running on the CloudFront
infrastructure. Learn more about Lambda@Edge.

Dynamic content & API acceleration

Amazon CloudFront can be used to secure and accelerate your WebSocket traffic as well as API
calls. CloudFront supports proxy methods (POST, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, and PATCH) and is
already integrated with Amazon API Gateway by default. With the Content Delivery Network (CDN),
TLS connections with clients terminate at a nearby edge location, then CloudFront uses optimized
AWS-backbone network paths to securely reach your API servers. Learn more about API
Acceleration with CloudFront.

Software distribution

Amazon CloudFront scales automatically as globally-distributed clients download software updates.

You can make your software available right at the edge where your users are, via the content
delivery network. The CDN's high data transfer rates speed up the delivery of your binaries,
improving customer experience while lowering your costs.

Amazon CloudFront Key Features

Amazon CloudFront Infrastructure

The Amazon CloudFront Global Edge Network

To deliver content to end users with lower latency, Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of
216 Points of Presence (205 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 84 cities across 42
countries. Amazon CloudFront Edge locations are located in:
North America

Edge locations: Ashburn, VA (6); Atlanta, GA (6); Boston, MA (3); Chicago, IL (6);
Dallas/Fort Worth, TX (6); Denver, CO (2); Hayward, CA; Hillsboro, OR (3); Houston, TX (4);
Jacksonville, FL; Los Angeles, CA (5); Miami, FL (4); Minneapolis, MN; Montreal, QC; New
York, NY (2); Newark, NJ (7); Palo Alto, CA; Philadelphia, PA (2); Phoenix, AZ (2); Salt Lake
City, Utah; San Jose, CA (2); Seattle, WA (3); South Bend, IN; Toronto, ON (2)

Regional Edge caches: Virginia; Ohio; Oregon

Europe

Edge locations: Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2); Athens, Greece; Berlin, Germany (2);
Brussels, Belgium; Bucharest, Romania; Budapest, Hungary; Copenhagen, Denmark; Dublin,
Ireland; Dusseldorf, Germany; Frankfurt, Germany (10); Helsinki, Finland; Lisbon, Portugal;
London, England (9); Madrid, Spain (2); Manchester, England (2); Marseille, France; Milan,
Italy (3); Munich, Germany (2); Oslo, Norway; Palermo, Italy; Paris, France (5); Prague, Czech
Republic; Rome, Italy; Sofia, Bulgaria; Stockholm, Sweden (3); Vienna, Austria; Warsaw,
Poland; Zurich, Switzerland (2)

Regional Edge caches: Frankfurt, Germany; London, England

Asia

Edge locations: Bangalore, India (3); Chennai, India (2); Hong Kong, China (3); Hyderabad,
India (4); Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2); Mumbai, India (3); Manila, Philippines; New Delhi,
India (4); Osaka, Japan; Seoul, South Korea (4); Singapore (4); Taipei, Taiwan(3); Tokyo, Japan
(16)

Regional Edge caches: Mumbai, India; Singapore; Seoul, South Korea; Tokyo, Japan
Australia

Edge locations: Melbourne; Perth; Sydney (4)

Regional Edge caches: Sydney

South America

Edge locations: Bogota, Colombia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2);
Santiago, Chile; São Paulo, Brazil (2)

Regional Edge caches: São Paulo, Brazil

Middle East

Edge location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Fujairah, United Arab Emirates; Manama,
Bahrain; Tel Aviv, Israel
Africa

Edge locations: Cape Town, South Africa; Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya
China

Edge locations: Beijing; Shenzhen; Shanghai; Zhongwei

Learn more about Amazon CloudFront in China. >>

Security

Protection against Network and Application Layer Attacks

Amazon CloudFront, AWS Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), and Amazon Route
53 work seamlessly together to create a flexible, layered security perimeter against multiple
types of attacks including network and application layer DDoS attacks. All of these services are
co-resident at the AWS edge and provide a scalable, reliable, and high-performance security
perimeter for your applications and content. With CloudFront as the “front door” to your
application and infrastructure, you are moving the primary attack surface away from your critical
content, data, code and infrastructure. Learn more about AWS Best Practices for DDoS
Resiliency.

SSL/TLS Encryptions and HTTPS

With Amazon CloudFront, you can deliver your content, APIs or applications via SSL/TLS, and
advanced SSL features are enabled automatically. You can use AWS Certificate Manager
(ACM) to easily create a custom SSL certificate and deploy to your CloudFront distribution for
free. ACM automatically handles certificate renewal, eliminating the overhead and costs of a
manual renewal process. Additionally, CloudFront provides a number of SSL optimizations and
advanced capabilities such as full/half bridge HTTPS connections, OCSP stapling, Session
Tickets, Perfect Forward Secrecy, TLS Protocol Enforcements and Field-Level Encryption.

Access Control
With Amazon CloudFront, you can restrict access to your content through a number of
capabilities. With Signed URLs and Signed Cookies, you can support Token Authentication to
restrict access to only authenticated viewers. Through geo-restriction capability, you can prevent
users in specific geographic locations from accessing content that you're distributing through
CloudFront. With Origin Access Identity (OAI) feature, you can restrict access to an Amazon S3
bucket to only be accessible from CloudFront. Learn more.

Compliance
CloudFront infrastructure and processes are all compliant with PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, and
ISO 9001, ISO 27001, SOC (1, 2 and 3) to ensure secure delivery of your most sensitive data.

Availability

Increase application availability

Web applications often need to contend with spikes in traffic during peak periods of activity. By
using Amazon CloudFront, you can cache your content in CloudFront’s edge locations
worldwide and reduce the workload on your origin by only fetching content from your origin
when needed. This reduced workload on your origin helps you increase the availability of your
application.

Enabling redundancy for origins

CloudFront also allows you to set up multiple origins to enable redundancy in your backend
architecture. You can use CloudFront’s native origin failover capability to automatically serve
your content from a backup origin when your primary origin is unavailable. The origins you set
up with origin failover can be any combination of AWS origins like EC2 instances, Amazon S3
buckets, or Media Services, or non-AWS origins like an on-premises HTTP server.

Performance

Network optimizations for optimal performance

Amazon CloudFront is continuously measuring internet connectivity, performance and
computing to find the best way to route requests to our network; taking into account
performance, load, operational status, and other factors to deliver the best experience in real-
time. Amazon CloudFront is also running on the AWS global network backbone, that allows for
efficient transmission of requests between the CloudFront Edge locations and otherAWS
services, across regions and applications. Network-layer optimizations such as TCP fast open,
request collapsing, keep-alive connections and much more, enable the Amazon CDN to
accelerate both static and dynamic content for improved user performance.

Dynamic or static content

Modern websites and applications are a rich mixture of dynamic, personalized and static content.
Microservices also expose increasing numbers of APIs and requests between components.
Amazon CloudFront is optimized for both, providing extensive flexibility for optimizing cache
behavior, coupled with network-layer optimizations for latency and throughput. CloudFront
supports the WebSocket protocol as well as the HTTP protocol with the following HTTP
methods: GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, and PATCH. This means you can
improve the performance of dynamic websites that have web forms, comment and login boxes,
“add to cart” buttons, WebSocket-based applications, or other features that upload data from end
users. It also means you can now use a single domain name to deliver your whole website
through CloudFront thereby accelerating both the download and upload parts of your website.
Large libraries and media assets
As the global network infrastructure has grown and improved, cache retention has emerged as a
key contributor to performance. The content delivery network (CDN) is architected to keep
objects longer in cache and to reduce cache churn. Techniques like tiered caching and de-
duplication optimization of objects in cache help maximize cache retention.

Programmable and DevOps Friendly

Full-featured APIs and DevOps Tools

Amazon CloudFront provides developers with a full-featured API to create, configure and
maintain your CloudFront distributions. In addition, developers have access to a number
of tools such as AWS CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, CodeCommit and AWS SDKs to configure
and deploy their workloads with Amazon CloudFront.

Edge behaviors
Your CloudFront Distribution can be configured with multiple behaviors which govern how
CloudFront will process your request and what features will be applied. Take control of how
CloudFront caches, how CloudFront communicates with your origin, customize what headers
and metadata are forwarded to your origin, create content variants with flexible cache-key
manipulation, support for various compression modes, and other customizations. With built-in
device detection, CloudFront can detect the device type (Desktop, Tablet, Smart TV, or Mobile
device) and pass that information in the form of new HTTP Headers to your application to easily
adapt content variants or other responses. Amazon CloudFront can also detect the country-level
location of the requesting user for further customization of the response.

Lambda@Edge

Lambda@Edge helps web developers, mobile developers and Amazon CloudFront customers
run their code closer to their users. Using Lambda@Edge allows you to respond to requests at
the lowest latency across AWS locations globally. For web or mobile requests, the compute
request from your users can be delivered closer to them, improving their overall experience. You
pay only for the compute time you use. There is no charge when your code is not running. Learn
more. >>

Cost Effective

Pay-as-you-go publicly available pricing and committed-traffic private pricing

With Amazon CloudFront pay-as-you-go pricing, you pay only for what you use. There is no
minimum fee. For customers who are willing to make certain minimum traffic commitments, we
also offer private committed pricing.
Learn more about Amazon CloudFront pricing.

Free data Transfer between AWS cloud services and Amazon CloudFront
If you use AWS origin