This is the continuation of a series of posts where I post notes on Multi-Cloud computing. I am trying to cover what I learn on AWS, Azure, GCP from various learning portals such as PluralSight, Udemy, Qwiklabs etc... I hope you find it useful.
AWS Global Infrastructure:
- AWS locations are called regions. Each region is a geographic area in the globe.
- AWS has 77 availability zones within 24 Geographic Regions around the world. They are planning to add 12 more availability zones and 4 more regions in places such as Bahrain, Cape Town, Jakarta, and Milan
- Northern Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Northern California, Canada are some of the North American regions. GovCloud regions in North America are only open to government customers.
AWS Global Infrastructure Elements:
AWS Region
- They are independent off of each other.
- They reduce network latency for end user because the platform and assets are in same location where the end user / customer is based.
- AWS Regions allow infrastructure to be near the geographic boundary of the country where the customer resides. This is to meet local government compliance and regulatory requirements.
Availability Zone (AZ)
- Each region consists of two or more AZ.
- This gives AWS redundancy, availability and fault tolerance. In the event, there was a disaster, AWS customer would still be able to carry on their business.
- All AZ have one or more data centers behind its compute power
Data Center
- This where physical servers, storage, switches, loadbalancers, machine learning, iot equipments are fielded
- Any resources provisioned on the cloud gets created here.
Edge Location
- They are used for caching content near users so that they can experience faster execution of programs.
- AWS has more than 205 edge locations and 11 regional edge caches.
- They reduce network latency to access static images, files.
Azure Global Infrastructure:
- Azure can scale globally to reach more users.
- Azure provides reduced time for user to access data. They have very little network latency.
- Azure Cosmos DB is claimed to scale at planet scale.
- Azure provides data compliance services.
- Azure also has redundancy and availability.
Azure Global Infrastructure Elements:
Data Center
- Just like AWS, these are physical buildings with servers, storages, switches, loadbalancers, and various compute equipments
- When we provision cloud resources like Virtual Machines, Azure SQL DB etc, they all get created in these secure buildings.
Availability Zone (AZ)
- Just like AWS AZ's contain 1 or more data centers
- All AZ's are resourced with independent power, cooling, networking equipments
- App and data are distributed across AZ for redundancy.
- When one availability zone goes down, another availability zones takes over to keep operation active.
Region
- Just like AWS, the Region in Azure have two or more AZ.
- AZs within a region are connected with low-latency regional network. This ensures low latency.
- Presently, there are 54+ regions in 140 countries. That's higher than AWS or any cloud provider.
Geographies
- This is a group of regions in a geographic area.
- Many countries require data to be resident for compliance reasons. That's what this service covers.
- Data remains within the country or the geographic border.
Sovereign Region
- Azure offers this service to Governments only. This is equivalent to AWS GovCloud
- Isolated Region that's not open to public usage.
- They built and certified it as per government requirements.
Edge Zones
- Azure's closes equivalent to Edge Locations is Edge Zones
- Azure has introduced Edge Zones in preview in 2020
- There are three types of Azure Edge Zones: 1) Azure Edge Zones, 2) Azure Edge Zones with Carrier, 3) Azure Private Edge Zones
GCP Global Infrastructure:
GCP Global Infrastructure Elements:
Region
- GCP has 22 regions
- GCP regions are independent geographic area where application and data resides.
- They consist of 2 or more zones connected with each other using high speed network. Locations within the same region have network round trip latency under 1 milisecond.
Zones
- 61 Zones in total
- Unlike AWS, and Azure... GCP zones are individual data center.
- Each zone is supplied with independent power, cooling, networking infrastructure.
- Application should deployed across multiple zones in a region to make it fault tolerant.
- Data must be copied across multiple zones as well for redundancy and high availability.
Edge Network Locations
- GCP has over 142 edge locations around the world.
- Just like AWS, they cache data near the user to enable lowest of latency.
GCP Type of Resources:
- Zonal, Regional Reource, & Multi-region Resources
Zonal Resource
- It runs within a single zone.
- When a zone fails, all resources within it fails.
- Example of this resource includes: Google compute engine.
Regional Resource
- Redundantly deployed across multiple zones in a single region.
- Example of this resource is App engine
Multi-region Resources
- GCP manages it
- Deployed against multiple regions for high availability, redundancy, low latency.
- Example of this resource is Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud KMS, Big Table