
AWS Is Now Available from a Local Zone in Los Angeles - jeffbarr
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-now-available-from-a-local-zone-in-los-angeles/
======
Dunedan
That feels like they used the ground work laid with AWS Outposts to enable
such smaller auxiliary local zones as well: In both cases the control plane
still resides in the "real" region, but the data plane for a local zone and an
AWS Outpost is located somewhere else (customer data center or in the case of
this local zone somewhere in LAX). I'd even bet that the hardware that they
use to power AWS Outposts and such a Local Zone is the same. Of course
obviously the scale and the offered services are different.

~~~
jedberg
They said during they keynote that they used the outpost technology to make
this happen.

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bob1029
This could also be big for web UIs which leverage server-side rendering. I've
been ramping our use of blazor server-side for web interfaces, and putting an
application server in one of these local zones near where we all work/live
could have a really positive impact on perceived performance.

Right now, I ping ~50ms out to us-east-1 and things feel "pretty good" in our
server-side web UIs. If I could drop this by a factor of 10, we are getting
into gaming monitor latency territory, and pure UI state changes could be
resolved in timeframes that would be perceptually instantaneous for most
users. I.e. things like clicking a button to pop a modal you wouldn't even
worry about trying to make a client-side interaction anymore. You'd just wire
it up using some trivial @if(showModal) inclusion block on the server-side
html page template.

Granted, this imposes a pretty harsh geographic constraint if you have just
the 1 server, but it is likely feasible to separate the view layer from your
persistence/stateful layers, so you could host your view rendering services in
multiple local zones, with all the business logic and state kept in one of the
primary regions. Not all things can always be instantaneous, but if the UI is
highly-responsive there are countless UX approaches for indicating to a user
in a friendly way that they simply need to wait for a moment. Being able to
build your web UI around blocking calls into business logic seems like a
powerful place to be in terms of simplicity and control.

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AaronFriel
Why is the parent zone for LA us-west2 in Oregon and not us-west1 which is
actually in California?

~~~
eropple
AWS seems to want to discourage the use of us-west-1, which is in San
Francisco AFAIK? us-west-2 probably has a lot more capacity. Historically it's
tended to be cheaper, too.

~~~
bitbckt
It’s in San Jose.

~~~
jsjohnst
Unlikely it’s just San Jose unless there’s only one AZ (and there’s two, plus
one for legacy customers only I thought). Each AZ is customarily separated by
at least a distance of a few miles.

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manacit
Does anyone have a test IP address for this? I'd love to see how far away it
is from where I'm sitting in Southern California right now.

~~~
kitteh
[http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/](http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/)

It's on here.

~~~
whalesalad
On an OpenBSD box that is hardwired:

    
    
        ping -c 5 70.224.224.253
        PING 70.224.224.253 (70.224.224.253): 56 data bytes
        64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=0 ttl=235 time=16.018 ms
        64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=1 ttl=235 time=13.120 ms
        64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=2 ttl=235 time=23.026 ms
        64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=3 ttl=235 time=13.656 ms
        64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=4 ttl=235 time=15.517 ms
    

Orange County, Spectrum cable. I used to get sub-10ms to us-east when I lived
in Fairfax County, VA.

~~~
blaser-waffle
> I used to get sub-10ms to us-east when I lived in Fairfax County, VA.

AWS East is in Ashburn, VA, just up Route 28 -- a stones throw from Dulles
Airport. Not sure if they're still in the Dupont Fabros buildings or the
Equinix campus.

~~~
jsjohnst
Only four of the data centers that make up us-east-1 are in Ashburn, most are
in the surrounding area (Sterling, South Riding, Chantilly, Manassas).

If interested, I listed them all out a while back here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876909](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876909)

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keithyjohnson
Who's excited about this? What's your use case that just became viable because
of it? Definitely don't mean these questions in a condescending way, just want
to get a read on the pulse from the folks here that will use it :)

~~~
nemothekid
The big use case I see are render farms. Moving terabytes of data can be made
incrementally faster if the DC Is physically located closer.

~~~
lalaithion
Unless there's better bandwidth, this will be on the order of milliseconds.

~~~
Pharaoh2
Its mostly higher bandwidth from being closer to source. Latency is definitely
improved but so is bandwidth if you are in peered in the same exchange. Peek
bandwidth is going to be much higher, especially if you are pulling/pushing
north of 10G.

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dpcx
I've always loved the "torn-page" look of some of the AWS Blog screenshots -
is there a tool to provide this functionality that I don't know about?

~~~
bl00djack
Seems like it's SnagIt's "torn edge" effect

~~~
jeffbarr
You are correct!

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ppierald
Let's see how much code like this exists:

if 'us-west-2' in region: // do it

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zknz
Presumably the first of many. Will they map this to all of their Cloudfront
locations eventually?

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bithavoc
AWS is slowly going after StackPath and Cloudflare.

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julianozen
Can anyone explain why this is different from a region or an AZ?

~~~
Dunedan
An AWS region consists of several availability zones (AZ's) which consist of
several data centers running AWS' hardware. Each region is designed in a way
that services provided by it can tolerate the loss of a availability zone. A
local zone is now something like an additional availability zone with the
important difference that it only runs a subset of services of a regular
availability zone and doesn't feature its own control plane (which are the
services AWS needs to run all this infrastructure including API endpoints,
etc.). Instead the control plane of the local zone just runs the so called
data plane which is what contains the services used by their customers.

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tus88
Does this host any actual services, or is it just a quick way to get on the
AWS backbone from LA? So it becomes a kind of "Region Endpoint"?

~~~
btgeekboy
The blog post contains a list. Quote: “Services – We are launching with
support for seven EC2 instance types (T3, C5, M5, R5, R5d, I3en, and G4), two
EBS volume types (io1 and gp2), Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx
for Lustre, Application Load Balancer, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.
Single-Zone RDS is on the near-term roadmap, and other services will come
later based on customer demand. Applications running in a Local Zone can also
make use of services in the parent region.”

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Scramblejams
For my niche use case, I'd love to see this somewhere in the middle of the US
so I can have a single instance with similar ping to both coasts.

~~~
luhn
Try us-east-2, it's located in Ohio.

~~~
yellowapple
canada-central-1 is also close-ish.

~~~
deftnerd
Oddly enough, ca-central-1 is in Montreal... even further east than their Ohio
and Virginia data centers.

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-
infrastructure/](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/)

Scroll down to AWS Global Infrastructure Map

~~~
mcbain
It seems Central Canada is more philosophical than Geographical.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Canada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Canada)

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Corrado
This would be exciting but I'm already having trouble managing subnets and
this just makes it worse. If these new Local Zones support IPv6 then that
makes it much easier to plan and support new networks.

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ckdarby
This is AWS running Outposts in internet exchanges instead of them building
out full datacenters.

~~~
nnx
That would be a very sensible way to dogfood Outpost indeed.

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nodesocket
> The new Local Zone in Los Angeles is a logical part of the US West (Oregon).
> us-west-2-lax-1a

Wow, yet more obscure non intuitive naming from AWS. Why not just us-
west-3a-local?

~~~
jsjohnst
It’s extremely intuitive, it’s part of the ‘us-west-2’ region, but an
extension in ‘lax’ and it’s the first availability zone there ‘1a’.

Your suggestion makes no sense, it implies an entirely new region ‘us-west-3’
but with an entirely different naming scheme (no regions have an ‘a’ on the
end of them) and the ‘local’ provides zero context about it with no expansion
capability.

