Networking on AWS
Networking on AWS is a vast topic that is out of the scope of this book. However, in order to easily explain some of the sections and chapters that follow, we will attempt to provide a brief overview here. First, AWS has a concept called regions, which are physical areas around the world where AWS places clusters of data centers. Each region contains multiple logically separated, groups of data centers called availability zones. Each availability zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security. Availability zones are connected via redundant and ultra-low latency AWS Networks. At the time of writing this chapter, AWS has 26 regions and 84 availability zones.
The next foundational concept we will discuss here is a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). A VPC is a logical partition that lets you launch and group AWS resources. In the following diagram, we can see that a region has multiple availability zones that can span multiple VPCs:
