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Difficulty: MediumAWS Global Infrastructure

A smart energy grid operator is deploying a critical monitoring application on AWS. To ensure continuous operation in the event of a localized physical disaster (such as a fire or power outage affecting a data center facility), the architecture must distribute application instances across separate, physically isolated locations that feature independent utility power, cooling, and network connectivity, while still maintaining low-latency network connections between them. Which AWS Global Infrastructure component is designed specifically to meet this requirement?

  1. A
    AWS Regions
  2. Availability ZonesAnswer
  3. C
    AWS Edge Locations
  4. D
    AWS Outposts

Answer

Availability Zones
Availability Zones are physically distinct locations within an AWS Region. Each Availability Zone is designed to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones, equipped with independent power, cooling, and physical security, while remaining connected via high-speed, low-latency private fiber optic networks.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the requirements: physical isolation of data centers to protect against local disasters (power failure, flooding) combined with low-latency network connections for application synchronization.
Identified the need for localized isolation within a single geographic area that does not introduce high latency.
This rules out cross-region architectures which solve isolation but introduce significant geographic latency.
2
Evaluate the AWS Global Infrastructure components against these requirements.
Availability Zones represent isolated locations within a Region, connected by low-latency networks. Regions are separate geographic areas. Edge Locations cache content.
Understanding the definitions and purposes of each infrastructure component prevents incorrect classification.
3
Select the component that uniquely satisfies both physical separation (independent power/cooling) and low-latency networking.
Availability Zones.
Each Availability Zone is engineered to prevent failures from propagating to other zones, while remaining close enough geographically to support synchronous replication.

Key Concept

Distinction between Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations for High Availability
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Topics

AWS Global Infrastructure

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