Now Open – AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region | Hacker News Reader

Now Open – AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region

aws.amazon.com

88 pointsjeffbarr48 comments

Route trace from Beijing Unicom Residential network, looks like packets are routed through japan, not sure if it's just temporary or will be improved later. (Comparing 50+ms from Beijing to other providers in Korea):

  3     5 ms     6 ms     3 ms  61.148.160.169
  4     8 ms     7 ms     6 ms  124.65.57.117
  5     6 ms     7 ms     6 ms  123.126.0.77
  6    36 ms    38 ms    39 ms  219.158.7.22
  7   109 ms   103 ms   105 ms  219.158.23.10
  8    42 ms    39 ms    41 ms  219.158.19.81
  9   165 ms   165 ms   163 ms  219.158.33.22
 10    89 ms    88 ms    87 ms  106.187.6.173
 11   164 ms   165 ms   168 ms  118.155.197.178
 12   177 ms   177 ms   177 ms  106.187.28.90
 13    94 ms    97 ms   100 ms  27.0.0.228
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15   179 ms   182 ms   180 ms  54.239.123.136
 16    95 ms    94 ms    93 ms  54.239.123.125
 17    98 ms   133 ms   102 ms  54.239.122.226
 18   161 ms   152 ms   143 ms  54.239.122.241
 19   101 ms   102 ms    99 ms  54.239.122.6
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23   100 ms    99 ms   100 ms  my.vps.ip.addr

* edit: removed my instance ip.

Thanks. I came hoping for an answer to this exact question. If it's improved latency it could be a good choice for a personal VPN.

BTW - which other providers in Korea would you recommend?

AWS(China) has been in preview for more than a year. Not sure when that will reach GA.

The Communist Party has a lot of 'requirements'. First of all you have to offer them a sigaret.

Man, Africa looks really sad. I was looking through their region list (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html) and everything is in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Africa's nowhere to be found.

Maybe if peering in Africa didn't suck big time and bandwidth wasn't prohibitively expensive, the situation would be different.

Anyway, AWS in South Africa isn't worth it if routes to nearby countries go through London anyway (like it's currently the case).

Even more sad, according to our customers and sales leads, is the lack of a Canadian presence. It's getting harder and harder to believe that they have nothing in Canada.

I think we[1] are going to open Montreal this quarter[2]. Not much help if you need EC2 style services, but if you just need to store some data in Canada ... you'll have an option. Drive-up service too.[3]

[1] rsync.net. HN-readers discount. Email.

[2] with he.net bandwidth @ 10gb/s

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259763

What is the killer app for a hosting region in Africa? All I have seen is gamers in South Africa complaining about the ping times to servers located in EU making real-time games not worth playing for them. But that's a relatively niche market.

It's ironic, as some of the AWS dev work was done there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud#H...

When I was at AWS I visited South Africa for a conference, and paid a visit to the local office in Cape Town. I don't think I can disclose any other detail (number of people, etc), but it is public knowledge that there is a substantial workforce still there, doing development and support.

The problem with an AWS region in Africa is, in my view, that there's not a large market to support the idea. South Korea is for sure more interesting.

Meanwhile, Google Compute Engine still only has four regions and hasn't expanded in over 18 months. (Don't get me started on App Engine, it's not even available for the Asia region!)

Still no presence in the entire southern hemisphere!

Google added their 4th region - US East - in October last year[1] but it's true that this is poor effort compared to Azure and AWS.

I wrote an article for InfoWorld about this at the end of last year: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3008617/cloud-computing/glo... and have a map of locations at https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zV7qz2PQ6Sz4.kJHcuw...

[1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/Bringing-G...

GCE's multi-regional buckets are quite awesome though and cheaper than paying Amazon to move between regions

Could you go into what the price difference is or what your use case is? Just curious in what situations I might want to consider Google over S3.

honestly i think http://blog.zachbjornson.com/2015/12/29/cloud-storage-perfor... does a better job than i could*

* benchmarks are easily fakeable - please don't bet your company on one

But Google has absolutely the best peering available, which is a great advantage for many regions.

On the other hand, OVH will have 12 more DC open this year, Starting with Portland and Ashburn in US, then Singapore and Australia.

AWS have at least 32 DCs - all regions have a minimum of two data centres for proper ha. There are four more scheduled to come online this year, India and UK.

If you think ovh and aws are comparable in anything but the very broadest terms you've not understood what AWS are offering.

They are not directly comparable of course.

OVH currently has 15 DC, of those additional 12, most of them are in new region, Australia, Singapore, Germany, US, and I think Japan. That will make 27 DC.

This isn't say they are comparable by size. Not at all. But you make it sounds like OVH is a small player. Linode, Digital Ocean are medium size. According to Netcraft AWS being first, DO recently became second, and OVH being third. But with the lots of $5 - $20VM DO host, those are VM numbers, compared to the Server Size OVH host.

I would also add that since OVH own and operate a large physical network[0], they can't really be compared to a hosting-only provider like DigitalOcean. This isn't 'like for like', and is only marginally useful for ranking either company.

Also, for those of us looking for server space to serve a primarily Western market, OVH and AWS are most definitely comparable. AWS have a huge and impressive range of features, most of which I simply do not need (though I'm a happy OVH, AWS, and DO customer because I'm not one to put all my eggs in one basket).

[0]http://weathermap.ovh.net/

Not sure if everyone realizes this, but often (outside the US at least) neither company build or owns data centers. For example, Amazon Sydney is in Equinix SY3[1].

[1] https://blog.equinix.com/2012/11/amazon-web-services-comes-t... (plus I know people who saw the equipment going in)

That's just a Direct Connect location right? Not the actual Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.

I'm guessing Equinix aren't allowed to say AWS is in their DC.

But their equipment is in there, 100% guaranteed (or at least was in 2012).

Edit: Here's a better reference:

Equinix yesterday launched phase two of its Sydney 3 International Business Exchange datacentre facility (SY3-II) in Alexandria, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) onboard as one of its first customers.... It was only confirmed yesterday — despite it being the worst-kept secret in the industry - that it is using Equinix's SY3-II datacentre.

http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/equinix-celebrates-launch-of-s...

I don't know for sure, but I also think that AWS Sao Paulo is in the Terremark DC.

AWS have two dedicated DCs ('AZs') in Sydney. For services that require quorum (Dynamo, SQS, S3 and others) they also have a private third 'AZ' in SY3-II. When you get an EC2 instance it is always in a dedicated DC, not Equinix.

Wow, is that the same with OVH? Since every one of their DC are specially built by them so far.

( Although it would make sense, since 12 totally new DC in a year is quite an achievement. )

I don't know about OVH. I know OVH built their Quebec DC, but I'd be surprised if their expansion plans don't include leasing space (if they don't already do it).

If you count edge locations (where stuff like anycasted nameservers, cloudfront and network PoPs are hosted) as well then the DC count is significantly higher than that

Don't forget the availability zones! Each region has 2-4 availability zones, and each of these has 1-6 datacenters. The scale of AWS is at least an order of magnitude more important than OVH's.

I believe Ohio (3 AZs, IIRC) is supposed to come online in 2016 also, but I could be mistaken.

Yep :)

It's not uncommon to use multiple providers, that way you don't need to rely on a single provider having multiple DC's in every location you want a presence.

Plus you know, less SPOF.

Will be awesome OVH in Ashburn. Perhaps only 1-3 ms away from AWS us-east.

YAY! Cheap compute from OVH and cheap storage from S3!

Can anyone comment on their performance boosts over Tokyo/Singapore with this new region?

Amazon has a peered connection at KNIX, although from most locations ingress traffic to the Seoul region is routed through AWS Tokyo first, so latency is probably going to be slightly worse than Tokyo unless accessed from within Korea.

Pricing seems very similar if not identical to the Tokyo region, which is not surprising since bandwidth is rather expensive in SK. Overall I feel this is built to satisfy SK's data privacy laws rather than commercial reasons.

And Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan???

We have been using servers located in North Virginia so far -- it is not that bad actually, definitely better than buying hosting locally.

PS: Why downvotes? If you disagree, please care to post your reasoning or experience.

I imagine you were getting downvoted for using multiple question marks, and people not understanding you were just asking a question.

Typically one question mark indicates a question. Multiple question marks usually indicates that you're upset about something or asking a rhetorical question.

For example, most people distinguish a difference between sentences like:

"What are you doing?"

and

"What are you doing???"

The first indicates a question, the second indicates you are upset or that the person is doing something wrong.

The way you wrote your sentence makes it look like you could be making fun of the person you are responding to.

Wouldn't Frankfurt or Ireland be closer than the USA?

Censored internet access though (Korean Porn-Blocker)

   [ec2-user@ec2 ~]$ curl youporn.com
   <html><script>
   var arg = "http://warning.or.kr";
   var str = new Array();
   str = arg.split("&", 1);
   var a = new Array();
   a = str[0].split("=");
   var b = Math.floor(a[1] / 100);
   var c = new Array();
   if(b == 10){location.replace("http://www.naver.com");}
   else if(b == 20){location.replace("http://www.daum.net");}
   else if(b == 30){location.replace("http://www.paran.com");}
   else{ c = a[0].split("?");
   location.replace(c[0]);}
   </script></html>

The availability of instance type also hints the future for other AWS regions.

E.g. T2, M4, C4, I2, D2, and R3 are available, but not M3 or C3.

Not that strange that they not are offering previous generation hardware at new locations.

I'd argue that m3 and c3 instances shouldn't be classified as "previous generation", since the m4 and c4 instances don't have any local ephemeral storage. Given the recent EBS incident in GovCloud, I think it's still pretty reasonable to be skeptical of EBS.

Is this the only source? https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3yv2db/aws_ebs_vo...

Out of curiosity, what is the biggest player in Korea for cloud computing, e.g. local ones?

Probably one run by KT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KT_Corporation). English website here: https://en.ucloudbiz.olleh.com/

Ucloud has 85% share in korean market. https://en.ucloudbiz.olleh.com/

I very much doubt this. Source?

Hey AWS, fix the issue of accepting Unionpay debit cards (not just credit) and I'll start using you again.

When will they start opening the inland China region?

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