While Regions and AZs are where your compute and databases live, Edge Locations are where your content lives — as close to the end user as possible.
What is an Edge Location?
AWS operates hundreds of Edge Locations (also called Points of Presence, or PoPs) in major cities around the world — far more than there are Regions. As of 2024, AWS has over 600 PoPs across more than 90 cities in 47 countries.
- Purpose: Edge Locations cache static and dynamic content (images, videos, HTML, API responses) closer to the user, dramatically reducing latency.
- Primary service: This is the physical network behind Amazon CloudFront, AWS's Content Delivery Network (CDN).
- How it works: When a user in Sydney requests a video hosted on a server in Virginia, CloudFront intercepts the request at the nearest Edge Location in Sydney. If the video is cached there, it's served immediately — no round-trip to Virginia required. If it isn't cached yet, CloudFront fetches it from the origin, caches it at the edge, and serves it. Every subsequent user in Sydney gets it from the cache.
Regional Edge Caches
Sitting between the full Regions and the smaller Edge Locations are Regional Edge Caches — a middle tier in the CloudFront hierarchy.
- Purpose: They hold larger volumes of content that isn't accessed frequently enough to remain cached at every individual Edge Location, but is accessed often enough that it shouldn't be fetched from the origin server every time.
- Flow: User → Edge Location → Regional Edge Cache → Origin Server. Each hop only occurs if the content isn't found at the previous layer.
- Benefit: This tiered caching dramatically reduces the load on your origin servers and improves cache hit rates globally.
AWS Global Accelerator vs. CloudFront
Both use the AWS edge network, but they serve different purposes:
- CloudFront is a CDN — it caches content at the edge. Best for static assets and cacheable responses.
- AWS Global Accelerator routes live traffic (non-cacheable) through the AWS private backbone instead of the public internet. It doesn't cache anything — it just finds the fastest path from the user to your application server. Best for real-time applications like gaming, VoIP, or financial trading.