PERF05-BP06 Choose your workload’s location based on network
requirements
Use the cloud location options available to reduce network latency or improve throughput. Use AWS Regions, Availability Zones, placement groups, and edge locations such as AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, and AWS Wavelength, to reduce network latency or improve throughput.
The AWS Cloud infrastructure is built around Regions and Availability Zones. A Region is a physical location in the world having multiple Availability Zones.
Availability Zones consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. These Availability Zones offer you the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center
Choose the appropriate Region or Regions for your deployment based on the following key elements:
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Where your users are located: Choosing a Region close to your workload’s users ensures lower latency when they use the workload.
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Where your data is located: For data-heavy applications, the major bottleneck in latency is data transfer. Application code should execute as close to the data as possible.
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Other constraints: Consider constraints such as security and compliance.
Amazon EC2 provides placement groups for networking. A placement group is a logical grouping of instances to decrease latency or increase reliability. Using placement groups with supported instance types and an Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) enables workloads to participate in a low-latency, 25 Gbps network. Placement groups are recommended for workloads that benefit from low network latency, high network throughput, or both. Using placement groups has the benefit of lowering jitter in network communications.
Latency-sensitive services are delivered at the edge using a global network of edge locations. These edge locations commonly provide services such as content delivery network (CDN) and domain name system (DNS). By having these services at the edge, workloads can respond with low latency to requests for content or DNS resolution. These services also provide geographic services such as geo targeting of content (providing different content based on the end users’ location), or latency-based routing to direct end users to the nearest Region (minimum latency).
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud DNS web service. It’s designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to internet applications by translating names, like www.example.com, into numeric IP addresses, like 192.168.2.1, that computers use to connect to each other. Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6.
AWS Outposts
AWS Local Zones
AWS Wavelength
Use edge services to reduce latency and to enable content caching. Ensure that you have configured cache control correctly for both DNS and HTTP/HTTPS to gain the most benefit from these approaches.
Common anti-patterns:
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You consolidate all workload resources into one geographic location.
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You chose the closest region to your location but not to the workload end user.
Benefits of establishing this best practice: You must ensure that your network is available wherever you want to reach customers. Using the AWS private global network ensures that your customers get the lowest latency experience by deploying workloads into the locations nearest them.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium
Implementation guidance
Reduce latency by selecting the correct locations: Identify where your users and data are located. Take advantage of AWS Regions, Availability Zones, placement groups, and edge locations to reduce latency.
Resources
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