What is an Edge Location in AWS

Question

Announcement! Career Guide 2019 is out now. Explore careers to become a Cloud Engineer or Architect!

While studying Global Architecture of AWS I have come across this term a few times. But I found it a little difficult to understand. Could someone give me a straightforward and more understandable answer for my question?

Answer 1

Let us start with brief explanation to get you started. AWS regions may have multiple availability zones. These availability zones are nothing data centres. What purpose these data centres serve?

• Connectivity with low latency (ie with other regions)
• Wider reach

Get a detailed understanding with the AWS training in Chennai.

Even if you have the AWS regions isolated its fairly simple to manage your resources that reside at different availability zones within the same region. Now this where edge locations come into picture If you were to take a literal definition from AWS Glossary pages, it would something like this: A site that CloudFront uses to cache copies of your content for faster delivery to users at any location.

Now what do they do? Edge locations serve requests for CloudFront and Route 53. CloudFront is a content delivery network, while Route 53 is a DNS service. Requests going to either one of these services will be routed to the nearest edge location automatically. This allows for low latency no matter where the end user is located. I hope this answer gives you a better perspective.

Also, check this out for knowing AWS and its services in detail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjPUyGKRjZs

Comments

Thanks for the explanation

---

Route 53 doesn't autmatically route to edge location according to latency. Also, low latency doesn't automatically mean the closest edge location. You might want to read up on Route 53 and record types.

Answer 2

An edge location is where end users access services located at AWS. They are located in most of the major cities around the world and are specifically used by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end user to reduce latency. It is like frontend for the service we access which are located in AWS cloud.

Answer 3

An Edge location is basically a small setup in different locations that provides low latency connectivity by providing static contents to be available from nearest location of the request. What happens is that instead of getting the information from the source it just routes to the nearest edge location and delivers the information reducing the latency. This way the access time is less and response is faster.

Answer 4

Edge location is basically a small setup in different locations which provides low latency connectivity by providing static contents to be available from nearest location of the request.

Answer 5

AWS Edge location is the place where the data’s are cached to reduce the latency to the end users. They are located in the major cities around the world . These infrastructure are used to provide only the services such as cloundfront, lambda, etc.

It can not be used for the main infrastructure such as S3, EC2, VPC, EBS etc.

Get ready to level up your skills as an AWS Developer! Join our comprehensive AWS Developer Associate certification Course!

Comments

While it cannot directly use S3, you can cache S3 objects via cloudfront, effectively putting s3 on the edge.

Answer 6

It is different from AWS region or availability zones. It is a location where the content is cached after retrieving it from the origin server.

Answer 7

Edge location means where the content will be cached and specifically used by CDN. In all over the world different edge locations will be available.

Answer 8

Edge Locations are used for static Content Delivery — part of AWS’ CDN service. Static content is replicated to those locations in order to reduce latency for delivery. There is no compute going on in Edge Locations, just storage of data. AWS’ DNS servers also sit in Edge Locations.

Answer 9

Just think of an Edge location as a data center that handles cached content for your users to help reduce latency.

Answer 10

They are simple physical data centers. Just that instead of having the complete set of data for your application, it hold only the highest hit data from all over the globe which are setup as a part of Amazon CDN. Ofcourse TTL needs to be respected in all scenarios and it depends on the the architect or app owner depending on their application design.

Answer 11

An EDGE location is where a request is received based on the requestors location if the service provider is using CDN.

For example, if you have an application hosted in AWS cloud and you are using CDN to make the application access fast and smooth then when a user requests for the application then the request to that application would go via the EDGE location not directly to the location where the application is hosted.

Answer 12

Edge location is a physical location where a w s has its servers that are used to stores cdn caching. Edge locations are used to provide low latency access to the data. For example if you have your data stored in a S3 bucket that is in India, but some percentage of your traffic is also coming from USA. In this case aws will store cache of your data in one of the USA edge locations so whenever request comes from USA it will be served from cache edge location that is in USA and request don't need to reach in India. Thus it will provide low latency access to your data and end users will have better experience.

Answer 13

Edge is location in Aws where end users connect to Aws services cloud. Egypt. Mumbai, Singapore etc

Answer 14

Edge location is where end users access services located at AWS. They are located in most of the major cities around the world and are specifically used by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end user to reduce latency. It is like frontend for the service we access which are located in AWS cloud.

Amazon CloudFront announces six new Edge Locations that are now part of its global network. These six new Edge Locations are located in the following cities: Perth, Australia; Chennai, India; Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; Los Angeles, California; and two additional Edge Locations in Tokyo,

Answer 15

Edge Location is the nearest Data Center from where contents can be fetched easily.

Example- Suppose we have a main Data center in London region and the user is sitting at Mumbai trying to fetch a content or object frequently from the main Data Center of London. Instead of that the cache memory keeps the content or the object in the nearest Data center of the user that is Mumbai so that everytime when the user tried to fetch the content or the object they can get it easily from the Edge location itself.

Hope i was able to answer your question.

Thanks and regards,

Nabarun Datta

Answer 16

pts of presence for cloud front

Answer 17

Lets take an example:- You are hosting a service which provide on demand video content. Your Service uses S3 to Store these video content and app buffer the content from the S3 bucket. Problem with this approach is

1. Bucket is global but storage is based in region. This will create network latency 

2. If 100K users read one file of 1GB 720P you will be billed for 100K GB

To over come AWS come up with an idea of edge location. This is a small setup in different locations which provides low latency connectivity by providing this video contents from nearest location of the request. This is done with help of CDN (content delivery network). CDN replicate Data from actual data center into these small setup. In our use case say you setup Copy data once in a day, CDN will move your data once in a Day to small setups called edge location and all requests will be fulfilled by CDN. 

Problem 1 Solve as CDN are close to user request

Problem 2 Solved as Data is read once from S3

Note this is not part of data Centers (ideally Map with Availability Zone). Other reference is its like a grocery shop near your home which is used for fast purchases e.g you need Cola use them. But if you want to buy 10000 ltr of Cola for marriage you will go to whole sale shop or distributer i.e. Availability zone.

Answer 18

Well, I'm not sure what "access services located at AWS" means in this context. Is the edge just a way to speed up these services' frontends, or the services themselves. i.e. if i want to use EC2 currently, the latency is horrific. Will this mean lower-latency access to EC2

"access services located at AWS" - means exactly what it says, access all kinds of different AWS services (and there are hundreds of then as you probably already know). It might help improve latency to some services but not necessarily. What would really solve your latency issues is if aws deploy a new region in Africa: 

The AWS Glossary states that an edge location is: A site that CloudFront uses to cache copies of your content for faster delivery to users at any location.

From AWS Forums: "An AWS region contains two or more availability zones. Each zone is basically a separate datacenter, and provides low latency connectivity to all other zones in the region. Your resources, such as EC2 instances, reside in the region of your choice. The AWS regions are isolated from each other, but you can seamlessly manage resources in different availability zones within the same region.

Edge locations serve requests for CloudFront and  is a content delivery network, while Route 53 is a DNS service. Requests going to either one of these services will be routed to the nearest edge location automatically. This allows for low latency no matter where the end user is located.'

Answer 19

Edge location is a small setup in different locations which provides low latency connectivity by providing static contents to be available from nearest location of the request.

Comments

Short and Simple! Thanks @Shashank!

---

Yes all the answers here are precise to the point. Good piece of information. @Umesh

Answer 20

• Edge Location is an intermediate between the end users and servers to access the services from AWS

• It is a small setup in different location to provide low latency connection by caching static content

• Basically, it’s a Content Delivery Network and used with AWS CloudFront Service

• The AWS services concerned with content delivery network and DNS are CloudFront and Route 53 respectively

• Any request to these two services is routed via edge location to avoid latency while data transfer

Answer 21

Edge locations are content delivery locations. They are basically caching locations.

Comments

What are content delivery locations?

Answer 22

An edge location is wherever end users access services located at AWS. they {are|they're} located in most of the major cities around the world and are specifically utilized by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end user to reduce latency. it's like frontend for the service we access that are located in AWS cloud.

Example for Edge locations and what its used for

Edge location is wherever CDN stores cached object/data to improve latency. If you have cloudfront enabled, and a user requests an object/data, CDN goes to the origin of that object/data, retrieves the object/data for that users then stores that object/data at an edge location to eliminate going back to the origin to retrieve the same data if the user or any another users requests same data. To get in-Depth knowledge on AWS you can enroll for live AWS Online Training.

Comments

Thanks that was a very good example. Got a clearer picture :)

Answer 23

Edge location is the location where you data is cached and this is help to access data faster .

example .

you going to access data first time :

1 . it will go first look at edge location , if requested data not found at edge location its hit at region ( availability zone)

2. fetch the requested data and  cached your data at edge location

3. if you again search same data then fetch from nearest edge location . it will not go to region .

Thanks,

Comments

Thanks @Anurag!

Answer 24

Edge location is a point where aws has put its services so that these services should remain up from that particular region.

Comments

Thanks, @Rajat for your contribution.

Please register at Edureka Community and earn credits for every contribution. A contribution could be asking a question, answering, commenting or even upvoting/downvoting an answer or question.

These credits can be used to get a discount on the course. Also, you could become the admin at Edureka Community with certain points.

Thanks!

Answer 25

Edge Location is an AWS data center designed to do fast delivery of services to any users at any location.

A subset of services where latency matters, they use edge locations, they are:-

• CloudFront: It uses edge locations to cache copies of the content that it serves, so the content is closer to users and can be delivered to them faster.
• Route 53: It serves DNS reaction from edge locations so that DNS queries that arise nearby can resolve faster.
• Web Application Firewall and AWS Shield: It filters traffic in edge locations to stop unwanted traffic.