New AWS Region in Sao Paulo, Brazil | Hacker News Reader

New AWS Region in Sao Paulo, Brazil

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86 pointsjeffbarr57 comments

Hopefully that means they'll be opening a data center in Australia before too long.

EDIT: To expand on where I'm coming from, I'm the technical lead at a web agency in Melbourne so I make recommendations on what hosting providers we use, both for our staging servers and live servers for our customers' sites.

We already have a few staging and live servers with AWS in California, but for most live servers we have to use Australian hosting providers for lower latency and (sometimes) for legal reasons regarding storage of customer data. I guarantee that if AWS were to open a facility in Australia, all of our hosting would move to that facility ASAP.

I hope so too. Bandwidth and hosting prices are outrageous. VPS rates are terrible too, though some vendors seem to have gotten the message in the last year or so.

Are you saying that bandwidth prices that you pay in the market aren't reflective of the actual costs to the provider?

Amazon doesn't even have cloudfront service there. It is pitiful. The convicts and kiwis are 10% of my business; I wish they got better service.

Fully fund Pacific Fibre (a non-consortium, private fiber link to AU/NZ/SG/US) at 512 Tbps, and then bandwidth should get a whole lot cheaper.

They will only light it up as it's purchased, which leads to supply / demand / pricing. The cost of lighting it up front is prohibitive and pointless to some degree as it depends on what the cables customers will need.

That being said, another cable system may help the cost of connectivity into AU. It's been on the downward spiral for many years.

It's a 2 pair system with DWDM. Their cost is actually basically the fiber and the DWDM gear. They won't launch unless they have enough committed revenue to cover opex, I'm sure, and to project to earn a good return on the cable as laid. The incremental costs to light additional 10GE or 40Gbps waves isn't that high (usually people start out with CWDM on a system, then upgrade the WDM gear once they need to do so).

I'm a little surprised that it's a 2 pair system -- I'd be a bit more comfortable with something bigger, but for a long repeatered fiber, your repeaters get more expensive per-fiber. I'm not sure what the costs would be for 2 pair vs. 8 pair -- I'm a lot more familiar with ~300km repeaterless fiber.

The main innovation here is being a corporate owned vs. consortium cable. I can see corporates, web hosts. etc. directly taking 1-10G capacity on LA-NZ-AU, as well as mobile carriers. Southern Cross, etc. are usually unwilling to sell capacity directly in the form of IRUs to non-members, and members are licensed telcos.

If this happens, I'd be really tempted to set up a business in NZ.

I second that, as do many others on AWS forums (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=271852). Other comment in this discussion is that this new Sao Paulo region is more expensive than the rest of them - I guess it would be the same (probably even more expensive) for Australia. However I'm sure that many AWS customers would be more than happy to pay for it. Without it, CloudFront is not truly global.

EDIT: please fill out this AWS survey, apparently this could potentially speed up adding the Australian region: http://aws.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_9yvAN5PK8abJIFK

It's pretty likely that AU will have more expensive pricing than most places. Amazon doesn't enter a market and ignore the cost base that applies to everyone in the market place.

I've been hearing stronger and stronger rumours about them opening in Sydney sometime soon, most often linked to a partnership with Equinix's big new datacenter in Alexandria...

(google google google) here: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/280702,amazon-chooses-sydney-f...

And searching Amazon.com's careers section shows vacancies for Data Center Ops Manager and various other management positions.

_Surely_ it'll be soon?

> Surely it'll be soon?

I'm not sure how that follows. There are more than 5 times as many internet users in Brazil than Australia, and about 13 times as many in the whole of South America.

A lot of my customers find the latency from Australia to southern Asia, EMEA, or North America far higher than what' typical with South America to North America. Might be a user experience play more than anything else.

What about Asia-Pacific? We have a service in AU which currently we're serving from our US-East servers, and I just assumed we would want to move to AP when we could, but is it not better than US-West?

That's what I assumed myself initially, so I spun up an AWS micro instance in their Singapore data center. But then I found that the ping times were almost twice that for instances in the US west coast, because some Australia ISPs (including mine which is Optus) route traffic to Singapore or Japan via the US west coast since it's cheaper than going through Perth. So although Singapore is closer to Australia than the US as the crow flies, it's not necessarily closer on the internet.

Damn I guess Cryptonomicon really was fiction.

No. Singapore might be closer physically, but it's not closer via connectivity.

Serving AU users from Singapore is much, much worse than serving them from LA.

That completely depends on your ISP and how they run their network. Decent providers should be directly connected into the right asian places.

If you're lucky enough to have customers on specific ISPs, Singapore can be great. We have users who are predominantly on AARNet, Internode and other ISPs with decent transit (e.g. SEA-ME-WE 3) and the latency between AU and SG via Perth is wonderful.

Anything to shake up the Australian hosting market would be welcome! We just ditched our AU CDN because it wasn't nearly as reliable as it should be, and very expensive to boot!

Have you considered OrionVM? The guys running that are amongst the smartest, keenest people I've ever met, and their setup seems second-to-none. Well worth checking out if you need Australian-based cloud hosting.

http://orionvm.com.au/

(Note, I'm not a investor or employee - I merely used to share an office with them and saw how they worked.)

Sorry to be slightly off-topic, but who would you recommend for Australian hosting, in place of EC2 US-west?

It worries me slightly the way AWS adds new regions with wildly fluctuating prices. We currently serve a decent amount of traffic in the US, over CloudFront. We also have some clients in South America, currently being served by the US pops. While speed isn't great, it's decent enough for what we're doing (simple jpg serving).

With AWS opening up a new pop in South America, all of a sudden, whatever traffic we have to South America is doubled in price, from one day to the other. While we don't serve enough SA traffic for that to be an issue for us, I can certainly see it becoming an issue.

As a customer I'd like to see an announcement of new regions some time in advance so I can prepare for the potential economic impact. Or perhaps an option to simply disable certain CloudFront pops if I don't care about them.

Why are EC2 and S3 in São Paulo 36% more expensive than US-East?

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

EBS volumes are 90% more expensive, and data transfer is 200% higher.

Much higher than US, EU, Asia Pacific. Are costs in South America that much more than the rest of the world?

Presumably power and/or network connectivity are more expensive, and they have to pass on the prices. Also, given the high cost of disks these days, it's not surprising EBS prices would be high in a newly opened region...

I imagine there's a large number of reasons.

Of the top of my head:

Supplier costs

Volume discounts smaller (until they scale up more at least)

Infrastructure partners more limited and costly

etc, etc

Real estate there is insanely expensive. Bandwidth is also likely pricier too. So datacenters will cost more.

Taxes, we have this service tax billed in são paulo that increases the price.

Brazil has a 60% import tax. Not sure if this applies to everything but it does to individuals and small businesses.

It only applies to individuals or business that choose to use a simplified import procedure. Large imports pay between 0% and 18% on most goods; IT hardware import taxes tops at 12%.

Of course, the import tax is just the beginning.

I once hosted a Zope site on three different datacenters - one for the ZEO server (the object store) and two others for the clients (the front-end/app logic). Worked well enough (Zope caches things very efficiently).

No. I really didn't needed to do it - I just wanted to know if it would work. I suspect a similar approach with light front-ends on low latency regions with heavy loads on cheaper regions would be a good technique depending on your problem.

Brazil's once largest airline used Zope a lot and not even they had problems that needed solving this aggressively.

Now that I am writing this, I remember there was a government (Plone-based) site that suffered a major data-center outage and we quickly switched to running their Varnishes in Brasilia off our mirror in São Paulo for weeks. Nobody outside the technical team noticed.

The entire IT "value chain" in Brazil (specially in São Paulo) is more expensive than any other location in the US. Honestly I'm surprised they could keep the overall price increase at around 36%. If you take real estate cost + taxes + data transfer costs alone, that would be enough to push operating costs way up. Labor cost could also be a big factor here, since payroll taxes are around 100% (for $1 pay to employee you give another $1 to goverment in taxes), but of course they have all the technology to put high degrees of automation to their benefit.

same here but we prefer to think of it as 50% ;)

Contrary to the popular saying here, brazilian payroll taxes amount to 56% of the salary in an annualized basis, not 100%.

I think that with typical US "glasses" on, 56% is more or less equal to 100% when it comes to taxation. :)

Of course, this is me being a bit prejudiced, but I think there's a least a bit of truth in there.

Yes, sure, you can always work out the numbers. If you skip unemployment insurance and some minor previdenciary collections you can get it to around 65%. But that won't make you attractive to the workforce in question. And, of course, you can always balance it with some contractors, at your own risk.

Honestly, I'm surprised how cheap that is. If you take into consideration that computers cost between 2x and 3x more, bandwidth 4x more, higher taxes and almost the same wages, it's a steal.

I expected it to cost between 2 to 3 times more.

Our current providers tend to cost 4x to 8x that, so I'm really curious to see how the market will behave.

I was lucky to be in Sao Paulo for a few weeks, setting up some trading systems. I think people generally underestimate Brazil's potential. Locals apparently joke that Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be. Lucky for them, the future has arrived. The enthusiasm of the locals (at least the elite) is infectious.

I heard a funny (and somewhat racist) comment there from someone who was explaining why Brazil is far more interesting than China or India: 'Brazil is basically a Western country. Would you rather go to China and eat frogs or go to India and eat spices so hot that they make you sweat?

Netflix, Rd.io, Senzari and iTunes Store have launched locally in just the past 2 months. Next year I think we'll watch a few good fights on the consumer apps and SaaS spaces. Internet usage will hit the 100m mark.

Brazil is on fire. Flush with oil money, 90% of electricity from renewable sources, a bottomless pit of energy and enthusiasm being held back only by corruption.

Here in Brazil, unfortunately, there is a sort of self-diminishing atittude where most people will always consider the country as an underdog.

Even though there was visible growth in recent years, people continue saying stuff like that.

When AWS brings GeoDNS to Route53 and ELB, it's going to be a lot of fun to play in all these datacenters. I can't wait.

don't wait. You can use Cedexis to do geo/cost/more with multiple aws regions/ availability zones: http://www.cedexis.com/products/cedexis-openmix/

How much is Cedexis?

São Paulo, it's there on the page you linked to. If it were spanish it would be san paolo.

On a more relevant note, finally. Google has had servers around here for a few years, along with most large CDNs. Cloudflare should take note, it's nearly unusable in Brazil right now.

Fixed, I keep making the same mistake. Doh!

Just a note: São Paulo in Brazil is named after Paul the Apostle, so in Spanish it would be San Pablo.

San Paolo is what it would be in Italian.

I think I'll finally stop using my Linode in Dallas (170ms delay):

    Pinging ec2-177-71-152-69.sa-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com [177.71.152.69] with 32 bytes of data:
    Reply from 177.71.152.69: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=43

I'm on linode and I host things targeted to people here in Brazil.

I don't think I'll move anytime soon. What I'm considering is hosting only the CSS on CloudFront and keep the rest on linode.

This is great. Still missing Amazon.com, the store... (quite difficult).

It seems servers like "us-west-2.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com" are only acessible from that area.

But "sa-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com" is an alias for "us-west-2.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com", so I can't ping it.

Try pinging "sdb.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com". I am located in Uruguay and got an average of 100ms, compared to around 300ms for other regions.

Parabens... I've been hoping/waiting for this for a year or two now. Great work, Amazon.

Thanks god !!! Brazil is finally being noticed by big companies.

this could be useful for people targeting LatAm services. lower latency could make up a bit for slower connections throughout the region

amazon is silently becoming a serious competitor to AKAMAI in term of location . now waiting for australia and of course China.

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