
Now Open – AWS US East (Ohio) Region - jeffbarr
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-us-east-ohio-region/
======
Rezo
Interesting tidbit in the announcement: Data between the US-East-1 and US-
East-2 regions is priced at the lower inter-AZ rate ($0.01 per GB, or half
price). That's pretty great if you're looking to add a layer of regional
redundancy.

~~~
RyanGWU82
It's actually cheaper than data transfer across AZs. Within a region, AWS
charges 1 cent per GB in each direction. You pay a cent to send data from one
instance and another cent to receive data on another instance. But between
Virginia and Ohio, they charge 1 cent to send data (in either direction) but
receiving data is free. In the end, it's actually cheaper to balance your
servers across one AZ in Virginia and one AZ in Ohio, rather than 2 AZs in the
same region.

But it's only a penny, right? How much could it matter? It actually matters a
lot. At both my previous and current employers, a surprisingly large portion
of our hill comes from data transfer across AZs. All the microservices, all
the memcache hits, and all the database replication add up quickly.

------
hoodoof
I really wish there was an API that allowed me to just get a list of all
available regions including their descriptive names.

As it stands, when AWS adds a region I have to make manual updates to update
my systems.

AWS has APIs for everything else, why not a comprehensive API for regions and
their descriptive names?

EDIT: for the downvoters - please specify exactly the REST API call that I
make to get regions and their abbreviated and descriptive names. I'd be happy
even to see the API in the JavaScript SDK. It doesn't exist.

~~~
inopinatus
It's in the SDKs. e.g. [https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-ruby/blob/master/aws-
sdk-core...](https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-ruby/blob/master/aws-sdk-
core/endpoints.json)

Icky and totally unsupported alternative: scrape the console. Look for meta
name="awsc-mezz-data" in the response.

~~~
hoodoof
Maybe in the Ruby SDK, not in the JavaScript SDK.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/latest/AWS/EC2.h...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/latest/AWS/EC2.html#describeRegions-
property)

And anyway, this is not something that should be in the SDK, it's a core part
of the AWS system and thus the data should come from a core API not an SDK
which requires updating.

------
oxguy3
Anyone know what part of the state the datacenters are located in? Or are they
just all over the place?

EDIT: Apparently the facilities are in a couple townships around Columbus
(which is in the dead center of the state). Neat.
[http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2015/05/29/...](http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2015/05/29/amazon-
has-big-plans-in-ohio.html)

~~~
niftich
For map nerds!

40.103706, -83.199873 in Dublin

40.061121, -83.134998 (originally rumored to be at a different, nearby site at
40.053217, -83.127493) in Hilliard

40.094640, -82.751469 in New Albany

~~~
reustle
Clickable

\-
[https://www.google.com/maps/search/40.103706,%20-83.199873](https://www.google.com/maps/search/40.103706,%20-83.199873)

\-
[https://www.google.com/maps/search/40.061121,%20-83.134998](https://www.google.com/maps/search/40.061121,%20-83.134998)

\-
[https://www.google.com/maps/search/40.094640,%20-82.751469](https://www.google.com/maps/search/40.094640,%20-82.751469)

All 3 points:
[https://www.google.com/maps/dir/40.103706,+-83.199873/40.061...](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/40.103706,+-83.199873/40.061121,-83.134998/40.094640,+-82.751469/@40.0832531,-83.1160276,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m11!4m10!1m3!2m2!1d-83.199873!2d40.103706!1m0!1m3!2m2!1d-82.751469!2d40.09464!3e0)

~~~
femto113
Zooming in with satellite view shows that all three sites seem to not only
have identically sized/shaped buildings, but they're also oriented the same
way (long axis running east/west). Any theories on why? Something to do with
cooling perhaps?

~~~
niftich
According to the Alliance to Save Energy, an east-west orientation "maximizes
daylight, while minimizing unwanted heat losses and gains" [1]

[1] [http://www.ase.org/resources/model-commercial-building-
effic...](http://www.ase.org/resources/model-commercial-building-efficiency-
uses-data-center-daylighting-save-energy)

------
AtticusTheGreat
As someone who works with a fairly large EC2 infrastructure, I find the move
towards EBS-only instance types somewhat alarming. For me, the main draw of
EBS is to ensure data is retained in the case of instance failure, but it
comes with significantly lower performance than instance-store SSDs and is
more expensive. I've resisted EBS for the most part, and all of my servers are
treated as disposable, but AWS is obviously trying to get rid of it as an
option. The only reason I can think of is the excessive amount of money they
can charge for EBS instances (especially PIOPS)

~~~
helper
YES. We have a strict no-EBS policy. Our main concern is that historically EBS
has been a big single point of failure that can take down an entire AZ or
worse a whole region. There were a number of outages in 2010-2012 that really
bad for EBS instances[1][2]. The rate of outages has certainly gone down since
then, but its hard to trust a system that has burned you badly multiple times
in the past.

There was a good post by Bryan Cantrill after one of those really bad
outages[3]. While this post is from an AWS competitor, the arguments about the
reliability of network storage are sound.

While the trend by AWS has been to move away from ephemeral storage, it
doesn't seem like they are working to completely kill it off. d2 and i2 fill a
lot of our storage node needs. For our compute nodes I could see us moving to
a model of booting off ebs and then pivot rooting into a ramdisk root fs so
nothing would touch ebs after boot.

[1]:
[https://aws.amazon.com/message/67457/](https://aws.amazon.com/message/67457/)
[2]: [http://www.agilesysadmin.net/ec2-outage-
lessons](http://www.agilesysadmin.net/ec2-outage-lessons) [3]:
[https://www.joyent.com/blog/on-cascading-failures-and-
amazon...](https://www.joyent.com/blog/on-cascading-failures-and-amazons-
elastic-block-store)

~~~
Terretta
AWS user since the start. Was firmly in the no-EBS camp. Still prefer it
aesthetically. No parts is better than good parts.

But they do seem to have figured it out, hasn't been the SPOF it used to be in
half a decade now.

// Knock wood, etc.

------
cperciva
I just finished copying FreeBSD AMIs into the Ohio region:

FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE ami-780a501d

FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE ami-88154fed

------
jd007
I wonder how far off the Canadian region is, which they teased in Jan to be
coming this year.

------
jsingleton
I wondered how soon "Coming soon" would be. Now I have to update my recent
blog post [0] before the final two parts are even out :) - part two is out
tomorrow BTW.

There seems to be a bit of an arms race with Azure right now. The current map
[1] has four more regions "Coming soon". Looking forward to London.

[0]: [https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-
pricing-c...](https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-
confusion-part-1/)

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

~~~
inopinatus
London might be RSN, the EC2 API endpoint for what I'm guessing is London (eu-
west-2) is resolvable, reachable and happily 401'ing requests as of a few days
ago.

Obligatory jest: they'll have to rename it post-Brexit.

~~~
jsingleton
Interesting.

I made the required EU quip in this post :) - [https://unop.uk/azure-eu-
regions-naming-confusion/](https://unop.uk/azure-eu-regions-naming-confusion/)

I've updated part one to include the new region, will probably have to update
for London again soon - [https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-
pricing-c...](https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-
confusion-part-1/)

Part two is also now out, part three next week - [https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-
azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-c...](https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-
lock-in-and-pricing-confusion-part-2/)

~~~
inopinatus
Can I suggest you update it to revise this spectacularly misleading statement:

 _" If you have a global presence then getting your content close to users if
very important for performance. Azure currently serves more regions than
AWS."_

Azure regions and AWS regions are not cardinally comparable. Their functions
and availability properties are not isomorphic. AWS would prefer that you
compare AWS AZs to Azure regions, and then they get to claim the larger
number. But I don't suggest that either, and the matter of content delivery is
another comparison again. The distinctions between the two platforms are
significant and well documented, so on reading this my trust in this source
declined rapidly.

I also flatly disagree with this article about the evils of lock-in.
Exploiting a rich platform is a recipe for high productivity and
opportunities. Re-hosting an application is rare, fraught with pitfalls, and
doesn't create any value. So why optimise for it? In my experience, it's
better to choose the platform best oriented to your organisation's culture and
principles, and adopt it wholeheartedly.

------
nodesocket
Anybody done a ping between EC2 instances in us-east-1 (N. Virginia) and us-
east-2 (Ohio)? Curious to see what the latency is.

~~~
virtuallynathan
The latencies to various locations are listed in the blog post -- us-east-1 to
us-east-2 is < 12ms.

------
tedmiston
It's interesting that they categorize Ohio under "East" instead of "Midwest".

~~~
theandrewbailey
I don't blame them. It is in the Eastern time zone. I grew up there, and
describing Ohio as anything west in the US always struck me as stupid.

------
vinny2020
So Ohio is a new center but still in the US Region?

~~~
dirtae
The US is not a region. US East (Northern Virginia) is one region, and US East
(Ohio) is another region. There are also other US regions, like US West
(Oregon) and US West (Northern California).

~~~
wmf
If there's confusion about the concept of regions, it seems to be coming from
Amazon themselves. They couldn't just call it the Ohio region?

~~~
bdcravens
Is that really an issue? Sometimes I get the number suffixes confused (like
us-west-1 and us-west-2). Additionally, would you refer to the Sydney region
or the New South Wales region?

~~~
cperciva
For people from outside of North America, "us-east-2" is far more informative
than "Ohio".

------
cbsmith
Just in time for the election... You don't think?...

~~~
Twirrim
What has the election got to do with AWS launching a new region?

~~~
cbsmith
I don't know... elections might involve needing an elastic supply of network
services accessible over low latency links to certain battleground states...

