In the Works – AWS Region in Canada | Hacker News Reader

In the Works – AWS Region in Canada

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140 pointsjeffbarr75 comments

We (rsync.net) should have our Montreal location up and running any month now.

We chose Montreal because that's where I want to hang out and tour in the off hours between building cabinets and burning disks in.

When Montreal is live, people with .ca-only requirements can run their VMs on EC2 and transfer disk images, S3 data and Glacier data between Amazon and rsync.net using 's3cmd':

  ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsync/mscdex.exe

Our HN readers rate[1] OR our petabyte rate[1] OR our non-profit/student rate[1] makes this very cost effective, relative to current S3 pricing.

[1] email us.

HN readers rate? What now?

They'll offer you a discount if you let them know you read this on HN.

Technically the French announcement should be first if they want to follow language laws. :)

I'm glad to hear this, as it was rather silly that a whole bunch of companies in Canada couldn't use AWS because of requirements around where their data must be stored. Now they will be able to.

They're announcing that they will be in Quebec. They're not in Quebec yet, and thus not subject to Quebec advertising laws yet. ;-)

Touché

  Touché

I wonder if it'd be possible to write an announcement that uses English words with French origins, sort of like how Zolotas made speeches in English that used Greek words.

Edited to add, for the curious:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~themis/ewords/zolotas.html

It's easy if you're talking about food and restaurant related things.

Silly? You are ok with a judicial system from a different country ruling over who can access your health or tax records?

Being on Amazon in Canada may not help you depending on the outcome of this: http://europe.newsweek.com/does-us-warrant-apply-data-stored... (as mentioned by @axelfontaine below)

And the requirements pertaining to Canadian data actually staying in Canada are largely overblown: http://blog.privacylawyer.ca/2011/04/cloud-computing-and-pri...

Oh I meant it the other way around. That Amazon was foolish for not doing this sooner.

In Quebec? Everything else at least in Ontario is English first.

Quebec != Ontario

Quebec is very protective of it's "French" culture.

Well, mostly the French language. It's certainly not France culture, which is why I assume you're using the scare quotes, although of course there's quite a bit of cultural exchange coming from France.

How is this affected by the case between Microsoft and the US Justice department regarding U.S. warrants for data stored on foreign servers? (See: http://europe.newsweek.com/does-us-warrant-apply-data-stored...)

I imagine it is being primarily driven by the recent vast decline in the Canadian dollar. Just about all of the costs involved are going to be about 30% cheaper compared to a couple of years ago.

I doubt long term infrastructure investments are affected much by short term currency fluctuations.

Quebec has cheap hydro power and a cool climate which are probably more important factors.

Not to mention that hydro quebec has some of the lowest electrical rates around and as a crown corporation (owned by provincial gov.), political considerations can bring the cost down substantially.

OVH is also near Montreal, in Beauharnois next to a large (1900 MW) run-of-the-river hydro plant.

Especially energy, and if you host a server in Edmonton (where I live) you could also save money on cooling, it was -27C a few days ago...

Probably unrelated. Many companies that work with Canadian data are required to keep it within Canada as mandated by the Canadian government, as has been for a fairly long while.

This allows those companies to use AWS rather than moving over to local hosting/compute/etc providers, and personally I have found the domestic hosting environment to be quite poor.

This is a great day for Canadian developers.

It is related. Even though you are hosting data in Canada, the US government may still have access to the data via Amazon (because it is a U.S. based company) depending on the outcome of that case.

Canadian companies are not required to keep data in Canada - http://blog.privacylawyer.ca/2011/04/cloud-computing-and-pri...

"This region will be carbon-neutral and powered almost entirely by clean, renewable hydro power." ... Like anyone living in that province.

Considering the low Canadian dollar and the low cost of electricity, will the pricing be different for people hosting in this zone?

I also saw that as taking undeserved credit at first, but the fact is, this region will be carbon-neutral and they are right to advertise it as such for those who would be interested in hosting in a carbon-neutral environment.

But they chose to put their datacentre in that province, possibly because of the accessible clean power. Why shouldn't they be allowed to advertise it?

Hydro power is a legitimate draw to get businesses into Quebec.

Digital Ocean also has a new Canadian datacenter...

https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/introducing-our-ne...

As is Microsoft: http://reimagine.microsoft.ca/en-ca/

Does this mean AWS will now start charging sales tax in Canada? My costs increased by 13% when Digital Ocean opened up in Toronto and had to charge me HST.

I'm sure your Canadian usage would be subject to GST (which may be why Amazon opted for Montreal target than Toronto) but I think they arrange the subsidiaries so that you don't pay taxes on your usage in other countries.

It doesn't matter for businesses of course, since GST/HST is a reclaimable VAT.

I think they chose Montréal for cheap electricity rather than sales tax issues. My residential rates more than doubled when I moved to Toronto. Looks like business rates follow a similar pattern: http://www.hydroquebec.com/business/rates-and-billing/rates/...

Yes, the Ontario government has horribly mismanaged the power utility, with extremely high rates resulting. I figured that Amazon probably wouldn't be paying retail rates, but if they couldn't negotiate anything better that would definitely explain why they avoided Ontario.

Digital Ocean seems to charge based on residence.

I pay 5% GST - there is no HST/PST in Alberta. But I pay this 5% GST on droplets that are in the NYC and SFO datacenters.

The credit card charge now comes from Digital Ocean Canada, but the prices are still listed in USD. They appear to convert to CAD before charging my credit card.

charge based on residence

Duh, you're right of course. I know this, too -- I have to go through the same headache of charging different rates to my Canadian customers based on where they're located.

I must have been asleep when I wrote that comment... alas, it's too late to edit it now.

I pay 5% GST - there is no HST/PST in Alberta. But I pay this 5% GST on droplets that are in the NYC and SFO datacenters.

Right, if the service is being provided to you by a Canadian company then they have to charge GST regardless of where the servers are. The same goes for Tarsnap -- my servers are EC2 instances in the US, but I remit GST/HST for my Canadian customers.

Can't you claim that as HST input tax credits though? It's not really fair to claim your costs went up 13% when it's all refundable.

True - short-term cashflow requirements increased by 13% is more accurate, due to the delay in getting the HST rebate cheque

That is very short-term, though -- small businesses are only required to file GST/HST returns annually, but you can elect to file quarterly or even monthly, and I've always had a cheque in my hands within two weeks.

I wonder if/how Quebec's laws on language will apply to content hosted there.

My guess is that unless your business is actually in Quebec then you should be OK, but it's an interesting topic.

Your data is your data, the issue is hosting a website to Quebec customers, which then might have a complaint from the OQLF

If you target Quebec customers then you will have to comply.

I'm intrigued to see when someone launches in Africa.

Yes, at least an edge location (for CloudFront CDN etc) in Africa would be useful.

Given that the team who originally built EC2 are based in Cape Town, it seems crazy that there is zero AWS presence in Africa.

the closest to anything really mainstream I'm aware of currently is CloudFare in Kenya. When I saw this last year it gave me some hope that the bigger players may start to look at Africa seriously in the near future. https://blog.cloudflare.com/mombasa-kenya-cloudflares-43rd-d...

Wonder how the CAD/USD exchange rate will affect pricing in the region.

Moreover I am curious about whether they will charge in USD or CAD.

If USD, then a Canadian firm still has to deal with currency exposure as with the US AZs

If CAD, it might be interesting if a lot of US load heads up to Canada chasing lower prices.

That's not how exchange rates work.

Please do enlighten me.

This is good news for Quebec, hopefully this won't take too long!

us-north-1?

+1 :)

But to be politically correct, it should be ca-east-1 ;)

Just hope Quebec doesn't have another referendum - qc-central-1 anyone?

As a western Canadian, it's fun (?) to joke about Quebec separation. (Indifference/irrelevance, right or wrong, is a common western view on it, I think.)

I had to look this up but it seems the last big poll of Quebecois on this was in 2011: 41% voted in favour of sovereignty. http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/323376/sondage-lege...

That's actually way higher than I thought. But if support for the Bloc Quebecois is any indication, the sovereignty movement was dealt a big blow in our fall 2015 election. They lost a lot of federal seats and smaller polls suggest popular support for sovereignty might be around 31% now. https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/quebec-indep...

Still, it's fun/interesting to talk about. As a westerner. ;-)

canada-eh-1

canad-eh-1 would be snarkier perhaps.

us-hat-1

ca-eh-1

you mean us-nord-1 :-)

ÉU-nord-1 (the US is États-Unis)! But I hope it would be ca-.

This is the first Ive heard about an ohio data center, that will be good news for us in the midwest - wish it was a bit further west than that but still better than East.

I think Ohio will be called us-east-2. It's not that far from their Virginia data center. Midwest for me would be more like Chicago or Kansas.

makes sense. any latency decrease though will be welcome.

Are they actually going to put it in mtl? It'd be more likely that they build a centre in beauharnois and benefit from cheap hydro like OVH

If it's anything like the other regions they will be building DCs scattered around the Montreal metro, not necessarily on the island.

Lots of cheap hydro electricity up there.

It's great AWS is expanding. Here's to hoping they fix the dire reliability issues they've been facing every now and then. I looked really hard at using AWS for ELB and other services but GCP won me over because they solved the ELB and scalability pre-warm up issue(s).

> dire reliability issues

Source?

Since the provincial government is already giving huge tax credits to the video game industries, I'm wondering the government will be giving Amazon any financial incentives to implement that in Montréal.

"...in the coming year". They've been claiming that the Canada datacenter is coming for awhile now... disappointed there are no details on launch date.

Anyone have insight into the timing?

They haven't claimed it publicly at all, until now.

You're right, I meant privately. It's been relatively widely known in Canadian tech circles that this is coming.

Sweet! Been waiting a long time for this one :)

This will have interesting effects for US patents that are practiced on AWS machines in Canada to serve client devices in the US. All the steps of a method claim in a patent must be performed in the US to infringe, so choosing to use machines in Canada will create defenses for many extant US patent claims.

This only works for method claims, though. Device claims in patents are a different beast.

And of course, this isn't new, but a AWS region in Canada will make the issue more prevalent.

> a AWS region in Canada will make the issue more prevalent

How on earth will it? The EU region launched 9 years ago & AP 6 years ago. Would the prevalence be in Canadian businesses who weren't aware of these other regions and the legions of other hosting providers available outside of the USA?

Low latency, at least by geographic distance, alternative.

That's nonsense.

Lohri gift ;)

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