The Paradigm Shift of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. From an architectural perspective, the most significant change is the transition from Capital Expenditure (CapEx)—buying physical hardware—to Operating Expenditure (OpEx)—paying for what you use. This allows for “Elasticity,” the ability to scale resources up or down nearly instantaneously based on demand.
In traditional environments, architects had to “guess” capacity. If you over-provisioned, you wasted money. If you under-provisioned, your application crashed during peak traffic. In AWS, we treat infrastructure as code. This means servers, networks, and databases are no longer physical assets but software abstractions that can be versioned, replicated, and deleted in seconds.
The AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS operates globally, and understanding its physical layout is critical for designing resilient systems. The hierarchy consists of:
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Regions: Physical locations around the world (e.g.,
us-east-1) where AWS clusters data centers. Choosing a region affects latency, cost, and compliance. -
Availability Zones (AZs): Discrete data centers within a region. They are physically separated by miles but connected by low-latency networking. Designing for high availability means deploying your application across multiple AZs so that a fire or power failure in one building doesn’t take down your entire service.
In this section, I learned:
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