I've heard rumours that Amazon is launching two edge locations near me, but it's not completely obvious what these actually are.
I've googled for a basic definition but this doesn't really clarify.
Are they just edge servers for their CDN?
The AWS Glossary states that an edge location is: A site that CloudFront uses to cache copies of your content for faster delivery to users at any location.
From AWS Forums: "An AWS region contains two or more availability zones. Each zone is basically a separate datacenter, and provides low latency connectivity to all other zones in the region. Your resources, such as EC2 instances, reside in the region of your choice. The AWS regions are isolated from each other, but you can seamlessly manage resources in different availability zones within the same region.
Edge locations serve requests for CloudFront and Route 53. CloudFront is a content delivery network, while Route 53 is a DNS service. Requests going to either one of these services will be routed to the nearest edge location automatically. This allows for low latency no matter where the end user is located.'