New AWS Region in Sydney, Australia | Hacker News Reader

New AWS Region in Sydney, Australia

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121 pointsjeffbarr36 comments

Looks like about a 30% price premium over EC2 instances in North America. 60% for traffic. Which isn't so bad at all compared with other local options. I think this will become the default hosting choice for a lot of Aussies.

IMO nobody's comparable to the likes of AWS / Linode / Rackspace Cloud in Australia. There are some bigger players, but if you're not at the "several racks" stage, you're usually dealing with 2-3 man shops, or with a retail DSL provider which has a 2-3 man "business hosting" team off on the side. My friend spun a VM up at Australia's second-largest ISP and the customer service people told him they'd fix it within 14 days after it "ran out of space" (it was a "20 gig disk" VM which he'd barely touched).

Did I mention expensive?

Several people are selling white-label VMWare cloud stuff, so I guess you could get a persistent API before today, but in all other regards someone both as accessible and competent as Amazon is a big win for us down here.

EDIT: 30% premium over Eastern US (Virginia) for the standard instance types. 23% for a reserved instance you'll run for a year. Other instance types range from 12% - 30% over Virginia.

Rackspace has opened in Australia too though right? They launched it a few months ago.

It's s necessary thing since you can't store any customer-identifying data offshore without explicit permission (see National Privacy Principles).

EDIT: Awww.. Rackspace's support chat person tells me they don't do cloud hosting in Australia. The cloud links on rackspace.com.au subtly point to the US site and US pricing. And the only way to get their non-cloud pricing for AU is for a sales rep from the AU office to call me back.

They are opening their DC in Sydney in Q1 next year. Cloud servers wont be there at launch but will come "in the months to follow".

I'm looking forward to that too.

Rackspace is currently not in Australia... if it was we would use them in a heartbeat.

We (I work for Rackspace) announced a DC there recently and private cloud OpenStack solutions: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-comes-to-australiaan...

Should we consider public cloud?

We use Rackspace Sites for our most of our clients who don't need servers, HOWEVER... I would love to see Public Cloud Servers for Rackspace as we love the US Based Rackspace servers (but you would make our year if you had rackspace servers in Australia).

Yes Yes Yes!! I live in NZ and hosting options here are even more expensive. Something close, properly provisioned and at low latency would be fantastic.

While maybe more expensive then US locations, it is still very competitive compared to other (few) Australian options - http://www.cloudorado.com/#;(r:(r:5)))

A couple of interesting points about Sydney's prices:

- EC2 prices are the same as Singapore and Europe (apart from Spot Instances obviously)

- EBS prices are the same as Singapore except EBS Snapshots to S3, which are more expensive in Sydney

- S3 prices are the same as Northern California

- RDS prices are the same as Europe, Northern California and Singapore

- Data transfer prices are cheaper than South America but are, on average, more expensive than Singapore and Tokyo. It's strange as some of the tiers are more expensive but some are identical or cheaper.

With the addition of Sydney's new prices to PlanForCloud, we now have over 10K price points from AWS, Rackspace, Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine and SoftLayer (login as a guest to try it: https://my.planforcloud.com/?guest=true)

Definitely great to have this as another local option.

Our preferred onshore hosting provider in recent times has been OrionVM. They are awesome in terms of customer service and raw IO performance, but they don't seem to want to augment their VPS offering with other essential components (eg: backups, DNS, S3-like file storage).

I definitely, for once, don't feel like we're at the end of the earth in terms of "developer love"*

*(I'm looking at you, Stripe).

It's a good feeling.

There's also Pin - https://pin.net.au/ which offers an alternative to Stripe for us in Aus, unfortunately it's still not live but they are saying 'soon'..

PIN are in danger of becoming a vapourware joke

With what evidence? From what I've heard PIN seems to be doing very well in private beta.

Yeah I've heard good things too. It has been a long time since Pin was first announced but I'll bet it's no easy task getting all the legal and financial stuff sorted out, as far as I know they're the only company in Australia attempting this kind of disruption.

As a side note, I sent them an email at around 1.00am on monday and got a response within 10 minutes which was a nice surprise.

I'm in their private beta ... there's no actual payment processing ... just the API in a sandbox.

No word on pricing either.

PIN has a really nice API. The minute it goes live we'll be integrating it into everything we do. They are also based in Perth which is awesome :).

Yes, but they've been saying 'soon' for most of this year. I've asked them directly and they have absolutely no idea when they will launch

Getting about 80-100ms from Perth to Sydney on a EC2 micro instance.

Well the distance between Perth and Sydney is similar to New York and SF. And pings between NY and SF are usually in the same range ~(70-90ms) so not too shabby

Yep, this is actually quite good. I see 90+ in some cases in Sydney so this is good.

I also see extremely good download speeds when testing from EC2 (it capped my connection instantly).

Out of interest, how does that compare with Perth to AWS Singapore? There are direct fibre links in both cases and there's not much in it distance wise.

Lots of Australian ISPs route to Asia via the US. So it's a coinflip as to whether any particular customer will see much better pings, or much worse pings, if you host in Singapore/Tokyo.

I'm not sure about Perth, but from AWS Sydney I'm seeing pings of around 400ms to AWS Singapore.

People who understand these things a lot better than I do always tell me that pings aren't a reliable measure of network latency.

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/11/12/announc...

Looks like they failed to negotiate better bandwidth charges with Telstra.

Anyone got an IP they wouldn't mind sharing for ping/route testing?

Why not just sign up for an AWS account and launch a Linux or Windows instance using our Free Usage Tier?

This requires a valid credit card however, doesn't it?

and an iPhone

Credit card, yes. iPhone, no.

I just set this up for testing: 54.252.21.161 micro instance on ap-southeast-2a (Sydney)

...it'll go away in a day or two, or if I see stupid amounts of traffic to it.

I just updated http://www.cloudping.info/

From San Francisco, I'm getting 187 ms to Asia Pacific (Sydney).

proxy-au.nikcub.com

I guess it's finally 1984 in Australia.

Now they can enforce more totalitarian DRM¹, with less latency!

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

[1] "Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...

(Don't mind the down-voters, they're just Ministry of Love slaves)

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