AWS Wavelength FAQs

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General

General

AWS Wavelength brings on-demand computing and storage services to communication service providers’ networks to enable customers to build and deploy applications that meet their data residency, low-latency, and resiliency requirements. AWS Wavelength offers operational consistency, industry leading cloud security practices, and familiar tools for automation.

Wavelength Zones are AWS infrastructure deployments that embed AWS compute and storage services within AWS telco partners’ data centers. Full details of current coverage are here.

Wavelength is designed to help AWS customers utilize local AWS infrastructure and services for data residency, low latency, and resiliency use cases. Wavelength is available to customers who process large amounts of personal customer data, such as telecom operators, financial services, healthcare industries, and local public sector institutions who need to meet data residency requirements. Customers running latency sensitive workloads such as gaming companies and enterprise software providers can provide improved experience for their end-users. Customers can combine AWS Wavelength with other AWS hybrid and edge infrastructure, like AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, and other on-premises deployments to improve their resiliency and availability posture.

AWS enterprise customers can use AWS Wavelength to deliver low latency solutions for use cases such as Internet of Things (IoT), video streaming, live media production, and industrial automation. Customers with edge data processing needs such as image and video recognition, inference, data aggregation, and responsive analytics can use AWS Wavelength to perform low-latency operations and processing where their data is generated. This reduces the need to move large amounts of data for processing in centralized locations.

AWS Wavelength brings familiar AWS services to where you need them, enabling you to build innovative applications while providing an optimized low latency experience for customers and staying in compliance with data residency regulations. AWS Wavelength provides the agility, security, and scalability benefits of the cloud, enabling you to focus on building applications rather than on infrastructure management.

AWS cloud is sovereign-by-design and our commitment is to offer all AWS customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud. Wavelength Zones use the AWS Nitro system, a first-of-a-kind innovation to restrict access to customer data. Nitro, is the foundation of AWS compute services. Nitro provides a strong physical and logical security boundary and is designed to enforce restrictions so that nobody, including anyone in AWS, can access customer workloads on Amazon EC2. In addition, customers have always controlled the location of their data with AWS and can now choose to store and process their data locally in a Wavelength Zone.

AWS provides customers with a truly consistent hybrid experience by bringing AWS infrastructure and services closer to where they are needed. Customers can select from AWS Local Zones, AWS Wavelength, and AWS Outposts to choose the one or combination of the three that best meets their low latency, local data processing, or resiliency requirements.

AWS Local Zones are a type of AWS infrastructure designed to run workloads requiring low-latency in more locations, including video rendering and graphics intensive, virtual desktop applications. Not every customer wants to operate their own on-premises data center, while others may want to get rid of their local data center entirely. AWS Local Zones allow customers to take advantage of all the benefits of running compute and storage resources closer to end-users, without the need to own and operate their own data center infrastructure.

AWS Wavelength embeds storage and compute inside telco providers’ networks to help developers build new applications for end-users requiring low-latency, such as IoT devices, game streaming, autonomous vehicles, and live media production.

AWS Outposts is designed for workloads that must remain on-premises due to latency requirements, but where customers want that on-premises workload to run seamlessly with their AWS workloads. AWS Outposts are fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware, which allows customers to run compute and storage on-premises while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of cloud services. For example: If your workload must remain on premises due to latency requirements, but where you want the on-premises workload to run seamlessly with the other AWS workloads, AWS Outposts is suited to meet that requirement.

Data residency and latency sensitive regulated applications such as real-time AI fraud detection for mobile payments or low-latency applications like cloud gaming platforms, game streaming, live video, event streaming, and machine learning (ML) video inference. These workloads require local compute and storage and can benefit from AWS Wavelength and Wavelength Zones.

Wavelength Zones are extensions of an AWS Region, allowing you to use the same AWS tools and capabilities you do today while minimizing the need to re-architect your application to reduce latency. If you have an existing application, all you need to do is select your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in the VPC console. In the Actions menu, choose to create a subnet in a Wavelength Zone. By default, the Carrier Gateway wizard enables Wavelength Zones for all carriers and locations available in the Region, or you can choose specific ones. The wizard helps you set up subnets for each Wavelength Zone. You can then launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances in the new subnets and run containerized applications on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). If you do not have a VPC, the easiest way to get started is to select the Create VPC wizard in the VPC console.

You can create Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and Amazon VPC subnets and carrier gateway in Wavelength Zones. You can also use services that orchestrate or work with EC2, EBS, and VPC. These include Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon EKS clusters, Amazon ECS clusters, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS CloudFormation.

AWS Wavelength also has a suite of third-party products to replace some of the services available in the Region but not available in the Wavelength Zone. For example, various third-party solutions are available as an alternative to Amazon S3, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) or Network Load Balancer (NLB). The services offered with AWS Wavelength are part of a VPC connected over a reliable, high bandwidth connection to an AWS Region for easy access to services including Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

You can use On-Demand Capacity Reservations to reserve capacity for your Amazon EC2 instances in a Wavelength Zone.

There are two ways to pay for Amazon EC2 instances in Wavelength Zones: On-Demand and Savings Plans.

Wavelength supports the following instances types for edge workloads: t3.medium, t3.xlarge, and r5.2xlarge for applications requiring cost-effective general purpose compute; g4dn.2xlarge for applications requiring GPUs such as game streaming and ML inference at the edge. All EC2 instances are EBS-based. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and Snapshots of EBS volumes are stored in the parent Region. EC2 Instances are only offered On-Demand; you cannot buy Reserved Instances in a Wavelength Zone.

You can use the AWS Cost Explorer to filter usage by Availability Zone, including Wavelength Zones.

Customers looking to strengthen their resiliency posture can combine AWS Wavelength with other AWS infrastructure like AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, or non-AWS on-premises deployments. AWS Wavelength can be used as a multi-tenant infrastructure in locations where there are no AWS Regions or AWS Local Zones. Any Wavelength Zone is a single zone but can be combined with other AWS or non-AWS infrastructure to improve the resiliency of your workloads.

Create a case with AWS Support to get help with AWS services running in Wavelength Zones.