Customer Showcase: Exploiting Multi-Region Data Locality with Lambda@Edge

Level: 200

Radiant Earth Foundation's mission is to help people utilize the vast resources of Earth imagery and tools for new solutions, discoveries, and innovations to address the world's development challenges. To advance cloud-based access to imagery, Radiant Earth has established a publicly available raster tiling service. As a non-profit offering a publicly available service, the goal was always to have this service operate as financially efficiently as possible. To meet this requirement and to simultaneously decrease system latency, it is useful for the tiling to occur as close as possible to each source, even while supporting a globally-distributed audience. To facilitate this, REF operates tiling Lambda functions and API Gateways in all AWS regions and redirects origin requests from Amazon CloudFront to the region where the source data (specified as a query parameter) is hosted on Amazon S3. This minimizes the latency of the (multiple) GET requests made while tiling while also reducing inter-region transfer costs.