03-04 Point of Presence PoP

Last updated Aug 18, 2023 Edit Source

Points of Presence (PoP) is an intermediate location between an AWS Region and the end user, and this location could be a datacenter owned by AWS or a trusted partner that is utilized by AWS Services related for content delivery or expedited upload.

PoPs live at the edge/intersection of two networks.

A Tier 1 Network (like AWS) is a network that can reach every other network on the Internet without purchasing IP transit or paying for peering.

Edge Locations are datacenters that hold cache (copy) on the most popular files (e.g. web pages & images) so that the delivery of distance to the end users are reduced.

Regional Edge Locations are datacenters that hold much larger caches of less-popular files to reduce a full round trip and also to reduce the cost of transfer fees.

The following AWS services use PoPs for content delivery or expedited upload:

#aws-service

Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that:

• You point your website to CloudFront so that it will route requests to nearest Edge Location cache

• allows you to choose an origin (such as a web-server or storage) that will be source of cached

• caches the contents of what origin would returned to various Edge Locations around the world

#aws-service

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration allows you to generate a special URL that can be used by end users to upload files to a nearby Edge Location. Once a file is uploaded to an Edge Location, it can move much faster within the AWS Network to reach S3.

#aws-service

AWS Global Accelerator can find the optimal path from the end user to your web-servers. Global Accelerator are deployed within Edge Locations so you send user traffic to an Edge Location instead of directly to our web-application.