

New AWS region now live: Asia Pacific (Singapore) - nethergoat
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/04/now-open-aws-region-in-asia-pacific.html

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amvp
At the announcement he mentioned that there would be multiple availability
zones - which we could treat as yeffectivly different data centers. I thought
they were _literally_ different datacenters. What exactly is an availability
zone?

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nethergoat
There is physical separation between availability zones, though I don't think
it's been made clear what that separation entails on a brick-and-mortar level.
Here's Amazon's description: "Availability Zones are distinct locations within
a Region that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other
Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity
to other Availability Zones in the same Region."

I've always envisioned AZs in a given region as separate facilities on the
same fiber loop.

Historically, we know that power and network outages have generally been
isolated to a single AZ, supporting their claim of a high degree of isolation.

Here's the relevant page in the EC2 docs:
[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/in...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/index.html?concepts-
regions-availability-zones.html)

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timf
Are there any surprising legal ramifications for running servers in Singapore?

