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New AWS Region in Sydney, Australia

121 points| jeffbarr | 13 years ago |aws.typepad.com | reply

36 comments

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[+] andrewf|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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).

[+] akh|13 years ago|reply
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)

[+] ra|13 years ago|reply
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).

[+] jameswyse|13 years ago|reply
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'..

[+] thejosh|13 years ago|reply
Getting about 80-100ms from Perth to Sydney on a EC2 micro instance.
[+] r4vik|13 years ago|reply
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
[+] tjmc|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] jacques_chester|13 years ago|reply
Looks like they failed to negotiate better bandwidth charges with Telstra.
[+] JosephRedfern|13 years ago|reply
Anyone got an IP they wouldn't mind sharing for ping/route testing?
[+] jeffbarr|13 years ago|reply
Why not just sign up for an AWS account and launch a Linux or Windows instance using our Free Usage Tier?
[+] will_hughes|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] nikcub|13 years ago|reply
proxy-au.nikcub.com