Frankfurt is home to DE-CIX, which is one of the largest traffic exchanges in the world - i.e. it's pretty central.
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.