AWS Global Infrastructure: Edge Locations
The final major piece of the AWS infrastructure puzzle is its network of edge locations. An edge location is a site where AWS deploys physical server infrastructure to provide low-latency user access to Amazon-based data.
That definition is correct, but it does sound suspiciously like the way you’d define any other AWS data center, doesn’t it? The important difference is that your garden-variety data centers are designed to offer the full range of AWS services, including the complete set of EC2 instance types and the networking infrastructure customers would need to shape their compute environments. Edge locations, on the other hand, are much more focused on a smaller set of roles and will therefore stock a much narrower set of hardware.
So, what actually happens at those edge locations? You can think of them as a front-line resource for directing the kind of network traffic that can most benefit from speed.