AWS Global Infrastructure Overview

In this chapter, you will learn the most important concepts about the AWS global infrastructure, and by the end of this chapter, you will be able to design highly available and resilient solutions in the cloud using multiple data centers, replicate data to a second region to perform backups and disaster recovery, and understand the trade-offs associated with the election of a geographic region. You will create a web app and deploy it using a content delivery network (CDN) with CloudFront, and manage the hosted zone in Route 53. You will also work with the AWS and S3 low-level API CLIs, and you will understand the consistency model and the security aspects of encryption of data at rest and in transit.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Introducing AWS global infrastructure
• Single-region/multi-region patterns
• Global CDN
• Data...

Technical requirements

1. You will need an AWS account. If you have not already done so, you can create one free (https://aws.amazon.com/free/) or, if you have one already, make sure you have enough privileges to create IAM users.
2. To perform the S3 exercises, it is recommended to download the AWS Command Line Interface, which can be found here, for a getting started guide(https://aws.amazon.com/cli/).

3. For the CLI, you need Python 2.6.5 or later, and the package manager PIP. Once installed, configure your client with the next command:

aws configure

This command will prompt you for the ACCESS KEY and SECRET ACCESS KEY from your IAM user, and for a working region. The region code can be obtained from the following resource: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html.

Introducing AWS global infrastructure

The AWS infrastructure is one of the most critical aspects of cloud computing, since many of the architectural and design decisions involve the use of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The infrastructure layer comprehends physical locations where these locations operate abstracted by a service interface. As solutions architects, we must have a clear understanding of service design that improves the overall availability compared to traditional environments. You will learn how to implement recovery procedures and strategies that allow for the automatic self-healing of components to achieve business continuity, enabling the delivery of secure and reliable applications to end users.

Becoming a service company

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Regions

AWS Regions are a means to deliver applications and services with a global footprint, allowing the elasticity of resources and information synchronization with a high level of control and isolation. They make it possible to execute multiple workloads, satisfying granular compliance programs in multiple countries. We shall discuss different points of view to assess the election of a geographic region to leverage every characteristic in our cloud deployments.

100,000-feet view

A group of AZs are included in a geographic region (two or more) and provide additional requirements besides availability. They are completely isolated from other regions, bringing more tolerance under failure. Management capabilities operate by...

Global CDN

Edge Locations are the last component in the AWS global infrastructure. They are collocated resources on the edge of AWS Regions. CloudFront uses this type of infrastructure for content delivery, to access services and data efficiently in the main cities of the world. They expand the functionality of the AZs, arranging an edge location cache providing low latency for applications, and it is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It is also used to propagate DNS and Amazon Route 53 anycast data; you can even execute AWS Lambda directly on the border.

Amazon CloudFront

This service is responsible for maintaining multiple copies of your data in different locations for a fast search, depending on where the request is being...

Data replication and redundancy with managed services

• Problem: We need replication of PNG images to a second region in the same AWS account to improve data durability, and in the case of a disaster, recover 100% of data to the primary region.
• Possible solution: Two S3 buckets need to be configured; one in each region to be completely isolated and avoid sharing the same failure line. For this exercise, versioning must be enabled and cross-region replication (CRR) must be configured.

This diagram shows that an S3 bucket can be found in one of three states:

Let's create an interregional deployment, using two S3 buckets with automatic versioning and replication, to synchronize objects from North America to Europe, just as depicted in the following diagram:

Exercise

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Hosting a static website with S3 and CloudFront

The Simple Storage Service (S3) is a great option to host a static website because it gives us the following benefits:

• Hosts every file with a 99.999999999% durability [DONE]
• High availability with an SLA of 99.99%
• Low cost for usage calculated for every 1,000 requests, plus storage, and data transfer fees

Our first step is to provision a bucket where we will be hosting our website; for DNS resolution, our bucket name must have the same name as the domain name; for this purpose, I have registered the domain s3websitehosting using Route 53.

Latency is an important aspect, so we need to choose a region closer to our end users so we can measure response times for HTTP endpoints using cloudping.info:

We will choose California because it makes sense from my current location:

Once we have created our bucket, let's create our web...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned the most important concepts about the AWS global infrastructure, the related aspects when choosing a geographic region, how Availability Zones work, and how to create a web distribution using CloudFront.

We hosted a static website in an S3 bucket, studied the consistency model under S3, and interacted with the CLI interface. We also implemented a disaster recovery solution replicating data between buckets using two AWS Regions. We tackled security aspects related to S3, such as ACLs, IAM policies, and versioning.

It is up to the student to recover data by simulating a loss of integrity in the origin bucket by deleting the original object, all the available versions, and the DELETE_MARKER (first delete the original object, then go to Versions | Show). Recover the object from the secondary region; you can help yourself using the aws s3 cp command...

Further reading

• Overview of Security Processes Whitepaper: https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/overview-of-security-processes/
• Data Center Security Controls: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-center/controls/