Whatever the location, it's still terribly expensive. Just looking at the Internet traffic charges makes my wallet hurt. I could not affort to serve traffic at any volume from AWS. Luckily there are a lot of other options in Germany.
This might have been more important when the first location was chosen than it is now, and latencies in Europe are mostly pretty minimal anyway.
> Ireland was probably chosen because of low corporate tax rates.
Perhaps you are right. It just sounds incredibly short sighted if true. That's like, to use notax's example location, locating your startup in North Dakota because the rent is cheap over there.
Amsterdam would have been a much better location with better and cheaper bandwidth from a much larger selection of providers. In addition to better infrastructure, Amsterdam has a wider and deeper talent pool for datacenter talent. I also have a hard time really buying the tax argument as Facebook and Google have European datacenters outside Ireland and they seem to manage their Irish tax strategy just fine. Even Apple is reportedly eyeing a datacenter in the Netherlands and I doubt they would consider one if it messed with their Irish sandwitch.
> This might have been more important when the first location was chosen than it is now, and latencies in Europe are mostly pretty minimal anyway.
From experience I can tell you that there is plenty of latency to go around in Europe. Part of that is Amazon's dubious choice of location and part of it is their network. Cloudping easily gives you latencies comparable to east coast - west coast ping times when testing from various European location to AWS Ireland.
Unlike popular entertainment would have you believe, Europe in not a country and neither is it the size of a postage stamp. You'd also be advised to consider that previously Ireland was Amazon's closest location to Russia and that in itself is a pretty big country.
Amusingly enough Amazon's Irish location is almost exactly like putting your datacenter in North Dakota as notax quipped.
Just look at this map: http://www.powercycle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/FireSho...
It's not like English is a problem in the Netherlands, but if you absolutely needed native English speakers then London with LINX would have been a much better choice for a datacenter.
What's not obvious is why Ireland was Amazon's first choice and not Amsterdam which is the premier location with AMS-IX.
In other words I was referring to Amazon's odd first choice in my first message. Sorry if that was unclear.
Logical locations for first batch of EU DCs: Amsterdam, Frankfurt.
Odd locations: Dublin, Frankfurt.
Even starting with London and LINX would have made far more sense than Dublin. Choosing Dublin as your first DC, is like putting your first US DC in some place like North Dakota.
erik_sub 19 hours ago | link [dead]
They are fairly equal. According to self-published statistics AMS-IX is nominally bigger in peak traffic and number of members.
Sources: https://ams-ix.net/ https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/
So if youve already got dub and you want to cover more of the map fra makes a lot of sense.
Aye and there-in lies the rub. Frankfurt is a fine second choice and even an excellent first choice. But of all the excellent choices available, why does dubious Dublin have the honor of first choice in AWS EU locations?
It just does not make any sense. Not only it is bad for Amazon, it's very detrimential to AWS users. Given a choice between Dublin and any other major IX location in Europe, I doubt anybody would have chosen Dublin. AWS users just put up with it since they had no choice.
I have many servers in Germany and I am able to offer 4 TB / month per VM at no extra cost.