AWS Architecture and Services

A Region is a physical location around the world where AWS clusters data centers. Each Region consists of multiple isolated Availability Zones. When choosing a Region, consider data governance and legal requirements, proximity to customers (latency), available services, and pricing. Examples include us-east-1 (N. Virginia) and eu-west-1 (Ireland).

An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers within a Region, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity. AZs are physically separated by a meaningful distance to protect against localized failures but connected through low-latency links. Running across multiple AZs gives your application high availability and fault tolerance.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object storage service offering virtually unlimited storage. Data is stored as objects in buckets. Each object can be up to 5 TB. S3 provides 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability. Storage classes include S3 Standard (frequent access), S3 Infrequent Access, S3 Glacier (archival), and S3 Glacier Deep Archive (long-term archive at lowest cost).

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale relational databases. It supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and Amazon Aurora. AWS handles patching, backups, and failover. You save time on administration while getting high availability with Multi-AZ deployments.

DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database. It delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale with built-in security, backup, and in-memory caching. Unlike RDS, it's serverless — you don't manage servers or infrastructure. It automatically scales throughput capacity, making it ideal for applications with unpredictable workloads.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time consumed — there's no charge when code isn't running. Lambda supports multiple languages (Python, Node.js, Java, etc.) and scales automatically from a few requests per day to thousands per second.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you launch resources in a virtual network you define. You control IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, and gateways. Public subnets have internet access, private subnets don't. Security groups and network ACLs control inbound and outbound traffic.