
New AWS region coming soon: eu-central-1 - nilsjuenemann
http://www.nilsjuenemann.de/2014/07/new-aws-region-eu-central-in-germany.html
======
ThePhysicist
Honestly this is great news! As the article says, many German companies insist
on their data being hosted in a data center in Germany when buying SaaS (for
whatever reason). So far, there haven't been any viable options when it comes
to "full-stack" IaaS service providers here (except Profitbricks maybe, which
doesn't even come close to AWS in terms of functionality or pricing though),
so I'm really excited to see Amazon entering this market.

Of course the problem remains that Amazon is a US company and thereby required
to cooperate with US authorities and hand them over customer data if
requested, so some businesses might still not want to host their data there.
Still, I'm excited that they're finally coming to Germany !

------
dmourati
Note, a region is not a data center. A region is a collection of two or more
Availability Zones (AZ). You can think of an AZ as a data center.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/images/aw...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/images/aws_regions.png)

~~~
thirsteh
But even an AZ is not necessarily one physical data center; it may be many.

~~~
dmourati
Agree, but it is somewhat unclear.

------
cowbell
I'll wait to see how this pans out first, thanks...

[http://phys.org/news/2014-06-microsoft-court-
overseas.html](http://phys.org/news/2014-06-microsoft-court-overseas.html)

~~~
us0r
Have you been reading the rest of the news over the last year or so? If they
want it, they are taking it. That is of course unless governments aren't
already sharing.

I had a potential client from the Netherlands (pre-NSA) say no thanks as we
are a US based company and he didn't want the possibility of the US government
obtaining his data. Fair enough I wasn't going to change his mind. Those who
travel frequently internationally know (or should) about a program called
Global Entry. Basically let's you go though the border using a machine instead
of talking to an immigration officer. At the time it was available to US
citizens (with a squeaky clean record) and Dutch citizens. What kind of
information sharing must the Dutch be doing with the US to allow us to
basically open our borders?

Back to data centers and pretending governments aren't in bed with the NSA for
some reason or another and a non US company owns the data center. Who do you
think is providing the pipe going into that data center? Almost certainly a US
company (or it is 1-2 hops away).

------
jann
I'm excited about the pricing, hopefully it's not more expensive than
Ireland... Maybe even cheaper, although I won't get my hopes up with
electricity prices in Germany being so high.

------
funkyy
I am happy that this is called central. I would like to see more recognition
to Central Europe in geo-political world as current line between west and east
Europe do not make much more sense anymore. Central europe culture and economy
ties makes it strong candidate to new order - West Europe Central Europe and
East Europe. I am thrilled to see what Amazon will have to offer!

------
tellnes
It looks like they have removed most of the DNS records, but eu-
central-1.amazonaws.com still gives an authorative answer.

------
jafingi
Awesome! But would still love to have a location in Amsterdam directly on the
AMS-IX.

~~~
iamtew
Luckily most locations in Amsterdam worth their salt is connected to AMS-IX,
[https://ams-ix.net/connect-to-ams-ix/colocations](https://ams-ix.net/connect-
to-ams-ix/colocations)

If AWS setup deployment in Amsterdam, I can't imagine it wouldn't be in one of
those places.

------
sunsu
Thought it said "us-central" at first. Was hoping for a Dallas datacenter!

------
rmoriz
Hopefully this will drive many DE ISPs out of business. Strato, 1&1 and
Hetzner are incapable of providing anything besides dumb webhosting and cheap
bare metal stuff. I've wasted so many hours trying to explain these companies
how the world is changing, they never got it and now it's too late to build
anything that could compete with AWS.

They (1&1, Strato, HostEurope, Hetzner, …) don't even try to provide OpenStack
packages or something leightweight-ish using Docker, except if you pay every
single hour of their manual work. 1&1 build something called ProfitBricks.de
which focusses of "designing your infrastructure in the browser", however they
build a big Java EE legacy framework with a nasty SOAP-API. Their sales pitch
is something like "we are cheaper than amazon/they rip of their customers".

And still they neither contributed support to LibCloud or fog.io so neither
Chef, Puppet, Ansible nor SaltStack work out of the box with it. I don't
understand those people.

~~~
lucian1900
Hetzner can give you extremely cheap physical hardware, prices which you
cannot hope to approach with AWS.

You don't need any of the buzzword-y technologies you list to be supported
directly by the host. If you want Docker, you can run it yourself.

VMs are over-rated.

~~~
seanp2k2
I don't have a horse in this race, but IMO the point is more about AWS-
provided infrastructure that lets people scale more easily than otherwise
possible; things like Elastic Map Reduce, S3, DynamoDB, SQS + SNS, RDS, etc
are less-easily replaced by home-grown equivalents. There are great open-
source solutions for every one of those things, but the point is having to not
manage them.

If you're using the cloud as "just another data center", I feel like you're
missing many of the benefits of software-defined infrastructure and disposable
systems.

~~~
lucian1900
Tying yourself to a specific provider is dangerous.

RDS and EMR are fine, since you can reproduce the exact same API anywhere
else. S3 is also fine, since its API is simple enough and even reproduced by
other vendors. Something like DynamoDB I wouldn't touch.

Things like AWS are great for when you don't yet know what you need, for
absorbing load peaks and for getting something running very quickly. They are
however the most expensive thing you can buy for what you get.

