

New AWS region: US West (Oregon) - cperciva
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/11/now-open-us-west-portland-region.html

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dsl
...and the part you actually care about which they don't mention in the post:

The new region is 'us-west-2' and has two availability zones.

EDIT: Here are the two sites that make up the availability zone. (the 'a' and
'b' monikers are randomized between AWS accounts, so it dosen't make sense to
label them as such)

Umatilla: <http://g.co/maps/yd8de>

Boardman: <http://g.co/maps/xuhdg> (It is not on sat view, between Columbia
River Processing and the power substation to the east)

~~~
davidw
That's a pretty drab bit of Oregon. The Dalles and Prineville are nice places
in their own ways, but way out north east it's pretty much just hot (or cold,
in the winter), dry and flat. Pretty boring...

~~~
msisk6
Flat and boring with cheap land, abundant hydro and wind power, and low-
humidity -- makes a good place for datacenters. Google, Amazon and Facebook
are already here with a few more in the works.

I just moved to Texas from Oregon and folks here are astonished when they
learn that the eastern two-thirds of Oregon is mostly desert; most folks think
of Portland and the coast when they conjure up images of Oregon, but it's a
really big state and the part east of the Cascades is different.

~~~
davidw
> Google, Amazon and Facebook are already here with a few more in the works.

Err... right, that's what I was referring to with my comment about The Dalles
and Prineville (Free Beef!), which are very different places from the
Hermiston area where the two AWS centers are supposedly located. The Dalles
and Prineville are both fairly close to some decent sized mountains, the
former being at the base of Mt. Hood, and the latter being located just to the
west of the Ochoco Mountains.

> it's a really big state and the part east of the Cascades is different.

Yep, there are some really fascinating bits of country there, and much of it
is _empty_ :

<http://padovachronicles.welton.it/2007/08/31/the-wild-west>

Some other favorite places to go see: Fort Rock, and Steens Mountain (one of
the emptiest bits of the US outside of Alaska).

~~~
msisk6
Yeah, it's a very cool region. I worked in Bend for a few years and got the
chance to explore a lot of Eastern Oregon. On my drive east to Texas I
actually drove by Steens Mountain and stopped in for burgers and ice cream at
Fields Station. Very remote and beautiful country.

------
bradly
As Amazon increases the number of regions, I really hope they make it easier
to work across regions. Not being able to migrate AMI's or replicate RDS db's
across regions is really a pain.

~~~
firemanx
We're launching a new VPC in the region today. Unfortunately none of the
Community AMIs we used in US East and US West-1 are available in the new
region yet :(

To second your sentiment, it would be really, REALLY nice if we could port
AMIs across regions.

------
ww520
The pricing is same as the US East. Excellent for building disaster recovery
mirrors.

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Thomaschaaf
Why put two regions so close to one another? I am really confused. Why not do
something in East Europe or central europe for countries like italy, germany
and maybe even russia.

~~~
msisk6
The regions aren't really that close to each other -- it's over 1000 km to the
other West region down in the bay area.

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rkalla
Curses, thught we would see the rumored AUS announcement. Great for super low
latency to NW though.

~~~
Maxious
Every day they don't announce an AU zone, is yet another day people who want
to be "in the cloud" are getting locked in to the IaaS/PaaS stacks rushed to
market by incumbent data center providers. Case-in-point:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/08/telstra_opens_sme_cl...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/08/telstra_opens_sme_cloud/)

This goes hand in hand with advice (arguably FUD) from those providers and
privacy "experts" that if you accidentally put IPP in the US or Singapore, you
will get sued over their domestic anti-terrorism laws allowing government
access. Again Telstra says "There are also legal implications. If an
organisation’s data is stored offshore, it is likely to be subject to the laws
of the country in which that storage facility is located.This could lead to
scenarios such as foreign government requests for access to stored
information."

~~~
jbarham
Telstra's so-called cloud is just another VPS service: Setup fees? Yes. API?
No. And you'd better hope that whatever you're running doesn't become popular
at $1/GB for the pay-as-you-go plan.

It's high time for AWS to set up shop Down Under and teach Telstra et al the
meaning of competition.

~~~
asharp
Bandwidth prices here are rather stupid.

Yes, it is OOM $100/mbit to get international bw. But that's nowhere near
$1/gig.

IMHO providers end up charging that much 1) Because they can and 2) To help
offset a very high cost base due to a lack of automation and inefficient
architectures. A million dollar san really doesn't pay for itself now, does
it?

~~~
rdl
For international traffic, 1Mbps CIR per month is 320GB/mo if used uniformly.
A markup of 3x to adjust for burst actual vs. CIR in advance is pretty
reasonable.

The real problem is that you don't have big neutral pipes. Build Pacific Fibre
(<http://pacificfibre.net/>) and then things might be ok. Or do differential
billing for domestic and international bandwidth, but for that, it helps to
have a non-English domestic language and have all consumers only interested in
local content due to the language barrier.

(Satellite is even more fun; CIR of $500-5000/mo for dedicated 1Mbps HALF
DUPLEX, and then sometimes more than that for shared service overhead; it can
come out to $10-20k/Mbps symmetric 100% use, with end user costs reduced
through transparent compression of images, filtering, and oversubscription.
Then there's L-band portable stuff which prices at $3-30/MB, and some which is
$0.01/byte.)

