Introduction to the hyper-scale cloud infrastructure
When deploying systems or stacks to the cloud, it is important to understand the scale at which leading cloud providers operate. The three largest cloud providers have created a footprint of data centers, spanning almost every geography. They have circled the globe with large bandwidth fiber network trunks to provide low latency, high throughput connectivity to systems running across their global data center deployment. The scale at which these three top-tier cloud providers operate are so much larger than the other players that it's necessitated the industry to adopt a new designation, hypercloud. The following diagram depicts the global footprint of AWS, the largest cloud provider by total compute power (estimated by Gartner):
Figure 5.1: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
In this image, each orange dot represents an autonomous region. The number within each orange dot represents the number of AZs. Green circles represent...