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Amazon's rental server network is so vast and invisible that it can be difficult to accept. Fortunately, there are a surprising number of tools to help you. One of the best tools comes from Amazon itself, which offers a color-coded interactive map of all Amazon Web Services sites around the world. There are many, and none of the places are more specific than "near San Francisco", but it's always fascinating. If you look at the map long enough, you start to see the strategy behind it, with an AWS presence near the population centers on each continent and just enough backups to redirect if a region has one.
Much of the more specific information we have about AWS 'physical footprint comes from WikiLeaks, which released the Atlas Atlas last October. This publication did not attract much attention at the time – largely because of WikiLeaks' ongoing political decline – but it offers a very interesting insight into Amazon's data center network, which has become a kind of parallel internet covering the whole world. Generally, it includes specific locations for many data centers in the United States and abroad.
The location of these data centers is not as secret as WikiLeaks suggests (some are even labeled on Google Maps), but there is still much to learn from the atlas. When I think of an AWS hub, I tend to think of a huge commuter warehouse fully controlled by Amazon, the digital equivalent of its notoriously demanding order processing centers. These warehouses really exist – especially in the states of Virginia, Oregon, and Washington – but most of AWS 'footprint consists of overseas centers located in colocation centers run by companies such as Equinix or Securus. Amazon has the same level of control over its servers and network in these hubs, but it's easier to let someone else take care of the building itself, just as much more than colocation facilitates interconnection when fiber is scarce.
This level of infrastructure has never known the kind of bloodthirsty competition we see on the rest of the tech stack. This is partly due to the very structure of the Internet. It's easy to connect to the Internet (that's the point), which means it's hard to create the kind of competitive advantage you could have on social networking or e-commerce. However, as the Internet becomes centralized and closed, it is still possible that data centers and fiber connections are one of the places of conflict between businesses. If this happens, the sheer scale of AWS will be a huge benefit for Amazon. If you've ever wondered why Amazon's streaming service never had the same networking issues as Netflix, that's why AWS is a must.
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