AWS Wavelength: An Introduction

AWS Wavelength utilizes the high bandwidth and ultra-low latency of 5G in combination with its own services (like compute and storage) to deliver a highly capable infrastructure that can host different application types. AWS Wavelength relies on Wavelength Zones; these consist of AWS infrastructure deployments residing in the data centers of telecommunication providers, located at the edge of 5G networks.

By placing the AWS resources in this way, end users can reach the application servers without ever leaving the telecommunication provider’s network. And because the traffic doesn’t extend to the public internet, latency is kept to a minimum, allowing customers to fully utilize the advantages of 5G.

Achieving ultra-low latency for various 5G applications is certainly one of this service’s many benefits. AWS Wavelength Zones also feature a high-bandwidth secure connection to their parent AWS Region, allowing you to easily access other AWS services when needed. As an AWS customer, you can work in a familiar environment, relying on AWS tools to build, deploy, and secure your product. Additionally, you get flexibility and the ability to scale, as you can create your applications once and easily deploy them to any supported AWS Wavelength Zone.


Supported Services

At the moment, AWS Wavelength allows you to create VPC subnets (and the appropriate carrier gateways), EC2 instances, and EBS volumes. There are many support services available, such as CloudFormation for deploying infrastructure, CloudTrail for logging, and EKS and ECS clusters for containerization. Your EC2 backup instances can also implement AWS Auto Scaling groups, Systems Manager, and CloudWatch. Databases like RDS and DynamoDB are not available in the AWS Wavelength Zones, but due to the high-speed connectivity between them and their parent AWS Region, they can be easily accessed. This also applies to S3 buckets, which are one of the most used resources on the AWS cloud.

For cost monitoring, AWS Cost Explorer is supported.


How Networking Works

When working with AWS Wavelength, you are expanding your VPC, so all of your EC2 instances will be part of your actual AWS Parent Region.

Carrier gateways are a new network component that provides connectivity from the AWS Wavelength Zone to the AWS Parent Region or the internet.