
New AWS Region in Sydney, Australia - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/asia-pacific-sydney-region-open.html
======
andrewf
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
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).

~~~
andrewf
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.

~~~
asher_
They are opening their DC in Sydney in Q1 next year. Cloud servers wont be
there at launch but will come "in the months to follow".

I'm looking forward to that too.

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akh
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>)

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ra
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
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'..

~~~
bluesix
PIN are in danger of becoming a vapourware joke

~~~
callumjones
With what evidence? From what I've heard PIN seems to be doing very well in
private beta.

~~~
jameswyse
Yeah I've heard good things too. It _has_ been a long time since Pin was first
announced but I'll bet it's no easy task getting all the legal and financial
stuff sorted out, as far as I know they're the only company in Australia
attempting this kind of disruption.

As a side note, I sent them an email at around 1.00am on monday and got a
response within 10 minutes which was a nice surprise.

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

~~~
tjmc
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.

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

~~~
jeffbarr
People who understand these things a lot better than I do always tell me that
pings aren't a reliable measure of network latency.

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lelf
[http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2012/11/12/announc...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2012/11/12/announcing-the-aws-asia-pacific-sydney-region/)

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

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

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

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

~~~
IheartApplesDix
and an iPhone

~~~
jeffbarr
Credit card, yes. iPhone, no.

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pyrotechnick
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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html)

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

