Working with Different AWS Regions

Wherever you or your customers are in the world, there are AWS data centers nearby.

Each AWS region is a completely independent stack of services, totally isolated from other regions. You should always host your AWS application in the region nearest your customers. For example, if your customers are in Japan, running your website from Amazon EC2 instances in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region will ensure that your customers get the lowest possible latency when they connect to your site.

New in the 1.4 release of the AWS SDK for Java, the SDK now knows how to look up the endpoint for a given service in a particular region. Previously, developers needed to look up these endpoints themselves and then hard-code them into their applications when creating a client, like so:

AmazonDynamoDB dynamo = new AmazonDynamoDBClient(credentials);
dynamo.setEndpoint("https://dynamodb.us-west-2.amazonaws.com");

With the 1.4 release, the SDK will look up a service’s regional endpoint automatically, so all you have to know is which region you want to use. This newer method looks like this:

AmazonDynamoDB dynamo = new AmazonDynamoDBClient(credentials);
dynamo.setRegion(Region.getRegion(Regions.US_WEST_2));

Regions can also create and configure clients for you, like a simple factory. This is especially helpful when you’re working with multiple regions in your application and need to keep them straight. Just use region objects to create every client for you, and it will be obvious which client points to which region.

AmazonDynamoDB dynamo = Region.getRegion(Regions.US_WEST_2)
                        .createClient(AmazonDynamoDBClient.class, credentials, clientConfig);

It’s important to note that the setRegion() method isn’t thread-safe. We recommend setting the region once, when a client object is first created, then leaving it alone for the duration of the client’s life cycle. Otherwise, the SDK’s automatic retry logic could yield unexpected behavior if setRegion() is called at the wrong time. Using the Region objects as client factories encourages this pattern. If you need to talk to more than one region for a particular service, we recommend creating one service client object per region, rather than trying to share.

Finally, at times it may be useful to programmatically determine which regions a given service is available in. It’s possible to ask a Region object if a given service is supported there:

Region.getRegion(Regions.US_WEST_2).isServiceSupported(ServiceAbbreviations.Dynamodb);

For more information about which services are available in each region, see http://thinkwithwp.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/regional-product-services/.

For more information about the available regions and edge locations, see http://thinkwithwp.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/.