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Comment by Maxious | Hacker News Reader

Every day they don't announce an AU zone, is yet another day people who want to be "in the cloud" are getting locked in to the IaaS/PaaS stacks rushed to market by incumbent data center providers. Case-in-point: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/08/telstra_opens_sme_cl...

This goes hand in hand with advice (arguably FUD) from those providers and privacy "experts" that if you accidentally put IPP in the US or Singapore, you will get sued over their domestic anti-terrorism laws allowing government access. Again Telstra says "There are also legal implications. If an organisation’s data is stored offshore, it is likely to be subject to the laws of the country in which that storage facility is located.This could lead to scenarios such as foreign government requests for access to stored information."

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Shipping data offshore has real legal implications that are anything but FUD. It's actually rather complex to unravel who has juristiction over what.

Telstra's cloud is rather sad. Manual day long provisions really arn't a cloud by any reasonable strech of the imagination.

That being said, not all of the new clouds are, well, backwards. Take a look at OrionVM (disclaimer, I work there). They have vm's that provision in seconds, that are HA under hardware failure, that have real distributed disks that are faster then comparable hardware disks, that have real private layer 2 networks, that have a remote out of band serial console, that has a damn pretty UI, ....

But at the end of the day, the market isn't there for cloud. US companies love us. US VC's instantly get us and our tech. But when we try and market here in aus, we've found that nobody here actually wants a cloud. What they want is a dedicated server without the hardware.

Which is depressing, if you think about it. Profitable, but depressing.

Telstra's so-called cloud is just another VPS service: Setup fees? Yes. API? No. And you'd better hope that whatever you're running doesn't become popular at $1/GB for the pay-as-you-go plan.

It's high time for AWS to set up shop Down Under and teach Telstra et al the meaning of competition.

Bandwidth prices here are rather stupid.

Yes, it is OOM $100/mbit to get international bw. But that's nowhere near $1/gig.

IMHO providers end up charging that much 1) Because they can and 2) To help offset a very high cost base due to a lack of automation and inefficient architectures. A million dollar san really doesn't pay for itself now, does it?

For international traffic, 1Mbps CIR per month is 320GB/mo if used uniformly. A markup of 3x to adjust for burst actual vs. CIR in advance is pretty reasonable.

The real problem is that you don't have big neutral pipes. Build Pacific Fibre (http://pacificfibre.net/) and then things might be ok. Or do differential billing for domestic and international bandwidth, but for that, it helps to have a non-English domestic language and have all consumers only interested in local content due to the language barrier.

(Satellite is even more fun; CIR of $500-5000/mo for dedicated 1Mbps HALF DUPLEX, and then sometimes more than that for shared service overhead; it can come out to $10-20k/Mbps symmetric 100% use, with end user costs reduced through transparent compression of images, filtering, and oversubscription. Then there's L-band portable stuff which prices at $3-30/MB, and some which is $0.01/byte.)

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