
New AWS Region in Sao Paulo, Brazil - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/12/now-open-south-america-sao-paulo-region-ec2-s3-and-lots-more.html
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jbarham
Hopefully that means they'll be opening a data center in Australia before too
long.

EDIT: To expand on where I'm coming from, I'm the technical lead at a web
agency in Melbourne so I make recommendations on what hosting providers we
use, both for our staging servers and live servers for our customers' sites.

We already have a few staging and live servers with AWS in California, but for
most live servers we have to use Australian hosting providers for lower
latency and (sometimes) for legal reasons regarding storage of customer data.
I guarantee that if AWS were to open a facility in Australia, all of our
hosting would move to that facility ASAP.

~~~
dasil003
What about Asia-Pacific? We have a service in AU which currently we're serving
from our US-East servers, and I just assumed we would want to move to AP when
we could, but is it not better than US-West?

~~~
foobarbazetc
No. Singapore might be closer physically, but it's not closer via
connectivity.

Serving AU users from Singapore is much, much worse than serving them from LA.

~~~
bronkowitz
If you're lucky enough to have customers on specific ISPs, Singapore can be
great. We have users who are predominantly on AARNet, Internode and other ISPs
with decent transit (e.g. SEA-ME-WE 3) and the latency between AU and SG via
Perth is wonderful.

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orcadk
It worries me slightly the way AWS adds new regions with wildly fluctuating
prices. We currently serve a decent amount of traffic in the US, over
CloudFront. We also have some clients in South America, currently being served
by the US pops. While speed isn't great, it's decent enough for what we're
doing (simple jpg serving).

With AWS opening up a new pop in South America, all of a sudden, whatever
traffic we have to South America is doubled in price, from one day to the
other. While we don't serve enough SA traffic for that to be an issue for us,
I can certainly see it becoming an issue.

As a customer I'd like to see an announcement of new regions some time in
advance so I can prepare for the potential economic impact. Or perhaps an
option to simply disable certain CloudFront pops if I don't care about them.

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panarky
Why are EC2 and S3 in São Paulo 36% more expensive than US-East?

<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/>

EBS volumes are 90% more expensive, and data transfer is 200% higher.

Much higher than US, EU, Asia Pacific. Are costs in South America that much
more than the rest of the world?

~~~
rarruda
The entire IT "value chain" in Brazil (specially in São Paulo) is more
expensive than any other location in the US. Honestly I'm surprised they could
keep the overall price increase at around 36%. If you take real estate cost +
taxes + data transfer costs alone, that would be enough to push operating
costs way up. Labor cost could also be a big factor here, since payroll taxes
are around 100% (for $1 pay to employee you give another $1 to goverment in
taxes), but of course they have all the technology to put high degrees of
automation to their benefit.

~~~
kawera
Contrary to the popular saying here, brazilian payroll taxes amount to 56% of
the salary in an annualized basis, not 100%.

~~~
rarruda
Yes, sure, you can always work out the numbers. If you skip unemployment
insurance and some minor previdenciary collections you can get it to around
65%. But that won't make you attractive to the workforce in question. And, of
course, you can always balance it with some contractors, at your own risk.

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paperwork
I was lucky to be in Sao Paulo for a few weeks, setting up some trading
systems. I think people generally underestimate Brazil's potential. Locals
apparently joke that Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be.
Lucky for them, the future has arrived. The enthusiasm of the locals (at least
the elite) is infectious.

I heard a funny (and somewhat racist) comment there from someone who was
explaining why Brazil is far more interesting than China or India: 'Brazil is
basically a Western country. Would you rather go to China and eat frogs or go
to India and eat spices so hot that they make you sweat?

~~~
jl6
Brazil is on fire. Flush with oil money, 90% of electricity from renewable
sources, a bottomless pit of energy and enthusiasm being held back only by
corruption.

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jbyers
When AWS brings GeoDNS to Route53 and ELB, it's going to be a lot of fun to
play in all these datacenters. I can't wait.

~~~
prakash
don't wait. You can use Cedexis to do geo/cost/more with multiple aws regions/
availability zones: <http://www.cedexis.com/products/cedexis-openmix/>

~~~
foobarbazetc
How much is Cedexis?

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ricardobeat
_São Paulo_ , it's there on the page you linked to. If it were spanish it
would be _san paolo_.

On a more relevant note, _finally_. Google has had servers around here for a
few years, along with most large CDNs. Cloudflare should take note, it's
nearly unusable in Brazil right now.

~~~
teoruiz
Just a note: São Paulo in Brazil is named after Paul the Apostle, so in
Spanish it would be San Pablo.

~~~
minimax
San Paolo is what it would be in Italian.

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swah
I think I'll finally stop using my Linode in Dallas (170ms delay):

    
    
        Pinging ec2-177-71-152-69.sa-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com [177.71.152.69] with 32 bytes of data:
        Reply from 177.71.152.69: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=43

~~~
slig
I'm on linode and I host things targeted to people here in Brazil.

I don't think I'll move anytime soon. What I'm considering is hosting only the
CSS on CloudFront and keep the rest on linode.

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swah
This is great. Still missing Amazon.com, the store... (quite difficult).

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swah
It seems servers like "us-west-2.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com" are only acessible
from that area.

But "sa-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com" is an alias for "us-
west-2.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com", so I can't ping it.

~~~
vierja
Try pinging "sdb.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com". I am located in Uruguay and got an
average of 100ms, compared to around 300ms for other regions.

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mixmastamyk
Parabens... I've been hoping/waiting for this for a year or two now. Great
work, Amazon.

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cfontes
Thanks god !!! Brazil is finally being noticed by big companies.

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brianbreslin
this could be useful for people targeting LatAm services. lower latency could
make up a bit for slower connections throughout the region

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Hikari
amazon is silently becoming a serious competitor to AKAMAI in term of location
. now waiting for australia and of course China.

