New AWS Region in Sydney, Australia

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/asia-pacific-sydney-region-open.html

by jeffbarr • 14 years ago

121 36 14 years ago

aws.typepad.com

pyrotechnick• 14 years ago

I guess it's finally 1984 in Australia.

Now they can enforce more totalitarian DRM¹, with less latency!

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

[1] "Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...

(Don't mind the down-voters, they're just Ministry of Love slaves)

andrewf3• 14 years ago

Looks like about a 30% price premium over EC2 instances in North America. 60% for traffic. Which isn't so bad at all compared with other local options. I think this will become the default hosting choice for a lot of Aussies.

IMO nobody's comparable to the likes of AWS / Linode / Rackspace Cloud in Australia. There are some bigger players, but if you're not at the "several racks" stage, you're usually dealing with 2-3 man shops, or with a retail DSL provider which has a 2-3 man "business hosting" team off on the side. My friend spun a VM up at Australia's second-largest ISP and the customer service people told him they'd fix it within 14 days after it "ran out of space" (it was a "20 gig disk" VM which he'd barely touched).

Did I mention expensive?

Several people are selling white-label VMWare cloud stuff, so I guess you could get a persistent API before today, but in all other regards someone both as accessible and competent as Amazon is a big win for us down here.

EDIT: 30% premium over Eastern US (Virginia) for the standard instance types. 23% for a reserved instance you'll run for a year. Other instance types range from 12% - 30% over Virginia.

bwooce• 14 years ago

Rackspace has opened in Australia too though right? They launched it a few months ago.

It's s necessary thing since you can't store any customer-identifying data offshore without explicit permission (see National Privacy Principles).

thejosh5• 14 years ago

Rackspace is currently not in Australia... if it was we would use them in a heartbeat.

andrewf3• 14 years ago

EDIT: Awww.. Rackspace's support chat person tells me they don't do cloud hosting in Australia. The cloud links on rackspace.com.au subtly point to the US site and US pricing. And the only way to get their non-cloud pricing for AU is for a sales rep from the AU office to call me back.

okrasz• 14 years ago

While maybe more expensive then US locations, it is still very competitive compared to other (few) Australian options - http://www.cloudorado.com/#;(r:(r:5)))

lelf• 14 years ago

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/11/12/announc...

ra3• 14 years ago

Definitely great to have this as another local option.

Our preferred onshore hosting provider in recent times has been OrionVM. They are awesome in terms of customer service and raw IO performance, but they don't seem to want to augment their VPS offering with other essential components (eg: backups, DNS, S3-like file storage).

I definitely, for once, don't feel like we're at the end of the earth in terms of "developer love"*

*(I'm looking at you, Stripe).

jameswyse2• 14 years ago

It's a good feeling.

There's also Pin - https://pin.net.au/ which offers an alternative to Stripe for us in Aus, unfortunately it's still not live but they are saying 'soon'..

thejosh5• 14 years ago

PIN has a really nice API. The minute it goes live we'll be integrating it into everything we do. They are also based in Perth which is awesome :).

ra3• 14 years ago

Yes, but they've been saying 'soon' for most of this year. I've asked them directly and they have absolutely no idea when they will launch

bluesix• 14 years ago

PIN are in danger of becoming a vapourware joke

thejosh5• 14 years ago

Getting about 80-100ms from Perth to Sydney on a EC2 micro instance.

tjmc• 14 years ago

Out of interest, how does that compare with Perth to AWS Singapore? There are direct fibre links in both cases and there's not much in it distance wise.

andrewf3• 14 years ago

Lots of Australian ISPs route to Asia via the US. So it's a coinflip as to whether any particular customer will see much better pings, or much worse pings, if you host in Singapore/Tokyo.

msmith• 14 years ago

I'm not sure about Perth, but from AWS Sydney I'm seeing pings of around 400ms to AWS Singapore.

r4vik• 14 years ago

Well the distance between Perth and Sydney is similar to New York and SF. And pings between NY and SF are usually in the same range ~(70-90ms) so not too shabby

thejosh5• 14 years ago

Yep, this is actually quite good. I see 90+ in some cases in Sydney so this is good.

I also see extremely good download speeds when testing from EC2 (it capped my connection instantly).

akh• 14 years ago

A couple of interesting points about Sydney's prices:

- EC2 prices are the same as Singapore and Europe (apart from Spot Instances obviously)

- EBS prices are the same as Singapore except EBS Snapshots to S3, which are more expensive in Sydney

- S3 prices are the same as Northern California

- RDS prices are the same as Europe, Northern California and Singapore

- Data transfer prices are cheaper than South America but are, on average, more expensive than Singapore and Tokyo. It's strange as some of the tiers are more expensive but some are identical or cheaper.

With the addition of Sydney's new prices to PlanForCloud, we now have over 10K price points from AWS, Rackspace, Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine and SoftLayer (login as a guest to try it: https://my.planforcloud.com/?guest=true)

JosephRedfern• 14 years ago

Anyone got an IP they wouldn't mind sharing for ping/route testing?

jeffbarr3• 14 years ago

Why not just sign up for an AWS account and launch a Linux or Windows instance using our Free Usage Tier?

olalonde• 14 years ago

This requires a valid credit card however, doesn't it?

nikcub• 14 years ago

proxy-au.nikcub.com

will_hughes• 14 years ago

I just set this up for testing: 54.252.21.161 micro instance on ap-southeast-2a (Sydney)

...it'll go away in a day or two, or if I see stupid amounts of traffic to it.

mleonhard• 14 years ago

I just updated http://www.cloudping.info/

From San Francisco, I'm getting 187 ms to Asia Pacific (Sydney).

jacques_chester• 14 years ago

Looks like they failed to negotiate better bandwidth charges with Telstra.

New AWS Region in Sydney, Australia

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