- Now let's talk about edge locations.
So edge locations within AWS
power several different services, namely Amazon Cloud Front,
which gives us a content delivery network,
Route 53, which gives us a global DNS service,
and API Gateway, which gives us serverless REST APIs.
And so with edge locations, you can see here on the map,
we have a number of different edge locations,
not all of them are actually drawn,
but we do have, currently, at the time of this video,
more than 100 edge locations worldwide.
Many of them actually exist outside of a region.
They could be just like a colocation,
or a small data center that AWS has
and runs in that area specifically for an edge location.
Now, we don't necessarily have direct access
to the edge location itself, they're more passive.
So if we were to use Cloud Front, for example,
and leverage the content delivery network,
then we could have our application run in,
say, U.S. East in Virginia.
Instead of making our European audience cross the Atlantic
for every single request, we can use DNS
to forward our European audience
to an edge location in Europe,
so that they can download content
that is cached on a server closest to them.
So the first person who asks for a piece
of content would have the latency of crossing the Atlantic,
but then everyone else, perhaps the next million people
who ask for that same URL,
would benefit from having it cached closest to them.
And then of course, the same thing works with DNS.
When we need to fulfill a DNS query,
we want to fulfill that as quickly as possible
with the lowest latency.
And so, by having DNS servers
running in edge locations all over the world,
this allows us to respond to DNS queries
with the lowest latency as well.
And all of these things, regions, availability zones,
and edge locations, we will be referring back to
as the course progresses.