AWS Basics Part 05 — Selecting region for AWS deployments
AWS is a trending cloud platform used in the industry. This series is for beginners to learn AWS from zero. Last article we discussed AWS messaging and queueing services. This article will discuss how to choose the perfect region for your AWS deployments.
When running applications in your own data centers you need to have proper disaster recovery techniques. Having a duplicate second datacenter is one method for disaster recovery. But when working enterprise-level, maintaining a second datacenter cost a lot.
AWS provides a cost-effective solution for this issue. AWS has large datacenter groups named “Region”. An AWS region is build to be closest to the business traffic demand. Each region is connected with high-speed fiber networks controlled by AWS.
Every region is isolated from each other. In other terms, no data can go in or out from the datacenter unless granting permission for data to be moved. There are 02 factors need to be considered when choosing a region for your application.
#01: Compliance
Before any other factor, you need to check whether your application has compliance. If your data should not leave a region, then select that region. As an example, if your data should be within Singapore, you need to select the Singapore region.
#02: Proximity
The next factor is how close you need to be with the customer. If your customer is from India, you need to select the India region. This is not compulsory. Say you choose the Singapore region for your Indian customers. Though data travel speed of the light, there can be a latency-the time for data to be sent and receive. So, choosing the region close to your customers is the best choice.
#03: Feature availability
Every year AWS releases new features and products for customer needs and requests. Sometimes these features and products require hardware. So, they can be available only for a limited region. However, your closest region may not have the services you require.
#04: Pricing
Though sometimes equal hardware is required to run services, depending on the region the operation cost may vary. As an example, you are running an application in the USA and Brazil. According to the tax structure in Brazil, the operation cost may a bit high than the USA Oregon region. So, if the price is your primary motivation, you can choose a low-cost region for your applications.
Now we know how to choose the correct region for the application. Still, we have the question we started, how to maintain two data centers / AWS disaster recovery techniques.
AWS regions are not one location. A group of AWS data centers is known as Availability Zone (AZ). When you deploy an EC2 instance, a virtual machine gets deployed on physical hardware installed in the defined availability zone. These availability zones are not built next to each other due to disaster recovery management.
The best practice with AWS, always run your AWS deployments across at least two Availability Zones in a Region. This means redundantly deploying your infrastructure in two different AZs.
In a nutshell, we discussed what is a region in AWS and how to choose the correct region for your AWS deployment. There are 04 factors to consider when choosing the region as, Compliance, Proximity, Features Availability and Pricing. Finally, we discussed what is an availability zone in AWS. We will discuss more AWS topics in coming up articles. Keep in touch.
Previous article: AWS Basics Part 04 — AWS SQS & SNS
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