The Impact of Availability Zones, Regions, and API Deployment Around the Globe
Werner Vogels shared a great story looking back at 10 years of compartmentalization at AWS, where he talks about the impact Amazon has made on the landscape by allowing for the deployment of resources into different cloud regions, zones, and jurisdictions. I agree with him regarding the significant impact this has had on how we deliver infrastructure and honestly isn’t something that gets as much recognition and discussion as it should. I think this is partly due to the fact that many companies, organizations, institutions, and governments are still making their way to the cloud, and aren’t far enough in their journeys to be able to sufficiently take advantage of the different availability zones.
In Werner’s piece, he focuses on the availability, scalability, and redundancy benefits of operating in different zones. Which I think gets at the technical benefits of this benefit of operating infrastructure in the cloud, but there are also significant business, and even political, considerations at play here. As the web matures, the business and political implications of being able to operate precisely within a specific region, zone, and jurisdiction are becoming increasingly important. Sure, you want your API infrastructure to be reliable, redundant, and failover when there has been an outage in a specific region, but increasingly clients are asking for APIs to be delivered close to where business occurs, and regulatory bodies are beginning to mandate that digital business gets done within specific borders as well. https://goo.gl/3R7eeg #DataIntegration #ML