Now Open: AWS Region in Tokyo | Hacker News Reader

Now Open: AWS Region in Tokyo

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53 pointsjeffbarr16 comments

I've released a FreeBSD 8.2 AMI in the new region now. Maybe next time Amazon launches a new region they'll give me advance access so I can have FreeBSD AMI(s) available without any delay.

My girlfriend came in a couple hours ago, and shook me awake as I tried to hit the snooze button again. "Hey," she said. "I think you'll want to look at the interweb tubes before work today."

"I already know about the stupid naziPad 2," I groaned. "Why would I need cameras on something I only use in the bathroom?"

"AWS Tokyo is live," she said, whereupon I pretty much vaulted over her as I leapt out of bed and turned on my phone and saw the announcement in my inbox.

This is really big news for us here. Even though the costs are indeed the highest of any AWS region, that was to be expected--physical data center costs here are the highest I have ever heard of, too. We've so far been able to play around with APAC/Singapore, and see what might one day be possible, but the latency and variabilty of the international link were too much for the 'real' stuff. Can't wait to start hooking this up today.

P.S. I for one am very happy with the pricing. It seems to be just as good a deal, relative to running your own infrastructure, as AWS is in other regions.

This is great news indeed.

Can anyone from Amazon say something about plans and/or an ETA for a South American region for all those people in Brazil, Argentina, Chile etc.?

I can't say anything other than that we listen to our customers and that we study usage patterns to drive decisions of this type. Feel free to PM or email me if you have any special needs.

The business is exploding right now, and we are listening closely to our customers about opening or expanding the service.

Anyone know a shortcut to get Amazon to respond an instance limit increase? We were assigned a "sales guy" but he has gone awol, and his voice mailbox is full. Filling out the form on their website does nothing. We have been trying for weeks.

Well, commenting on the blog post got me a quick response from the moderator and a promise to forward it over, so that's something.

That was me!

Thank-you again. Gotta love Hacker News--never know who you'll find on here!

Our request was fulfilled within a few days if I recall correctly.

If you're getting nowhere and need to get something done, you can also consider getting a bronze premium support ($49/mo, cancel anytime). This gets you 12-hour guaranteed response on tickets:

http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/

I find that they're surprisingly responsive when you post something to the forums on aws.amazon.com. Try posting there and I bet you'll have somebody from Amazon requesting they PM you within a couple hours.

Here's a comparison of various EC2 regions & other providers in the US: http://cedexis.com/data/charts.html?country=223&provider...

I wonder if Japanese developers are happy with the prices. Looks like they are the highest of all regions so far. (I'm interested in Spot Instances specifically)

Tokyo is a very overcrowded place, I suspect data center costs are high due to this.

Hrm. They specifically declined to state the exact location of the data center. Amazon's Tokyo physical products warehouse is way out in the middle of nowhere (near/in Funabashi) so assuming they built their own data center, real estate alone may not be the source of the cost delta. It could just be that they priced themselves to compete reasonably with their local "alternatives" (despite the apples/oranges quality of any such comparison).

Datacenter pricing here is massively higher than California, or any other place that I've lived.

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