What is an Edge Location in AWS

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.

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

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.