Edge Locations & Global Services
~8 min read
The much larger network of caching points used by CloudFront, and the handful of AWS services that aren't tied to any single Region.
Edge Locations are a much larger and more numerous network than Regions/AZs — hundreds of locations worldwide, versus dozens of Regions. They don't run your application code; they're used by Amazon CloudFront (AWS's CDN) to cache copies of static content (images, videos, JS/CSS files) physically close to end users, and by Route 53 to answer DNS queries from the nearest point of presence, both reducing latency dramatically for globally distributed users without you needing to run servers everywhere.
A small number of AWS services are Global rather than Regional: IAM (identity and access management) is a single global service — an IAM user or role isn't tied to a Region, it can access resources in any Region your account has enabled. Route 53 (DNS) and CloudFront are also effectively global in how you interact with them, even though the actual Edge Location serving a request is chosen based on the requester's location. Most other services (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, etc.) are Regional — you interact with a specific Region's endpoint, and resources in one Region are invisible from another Region's console view unless you switch the Region selector.
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Key points
- •Edge Locations (hundreds) != Regions (dozens) — edge locations cache content, they don't run your app
- •IAM is global — the same users/roles work across all Regions in your account
- •CloudFront and Route 53 are effectively global in usage even though they route through the nearest edge
- •Most services (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda) are Regional — always check which Region you're viewing in the Console