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AWS has several locations for storage and EC2 instances to run upon with different pricing. How could I determine which location is best for a particular region. Is it intuitive (closer to your serving region is the best) or are there any reliability concerns (particular AWS location facing more outages than others). Is there any data available for making such decision?
I am developing an application that is mainly targeted towards Indian customers. So, I am considering Singapore or Tokyo as an option.
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If most of your users access your applications from within North America, then it typically makes sense to deploy your software in an AWS region located in the US or Canada.
Each Availability Zone features at least one discrete data center. How does AWS decide on the location of the Availability Zones inside a region? Amazon ensures that the Availability Zones are as far apart as possible to promote fault tolerance and disaster recovery. Separate floodplains are targeted.
Sign in to the AWS Management Console . Choose a service to go to that service's console. In the navigation bar, choose the name of the currently displayed Region. Then choose the Region to which you want to switch.
The smart and innovative folks from TurnKey Linux recently open sourced their solution to your problem, see AWS Regional Data Centers mapping on GitHub:
This project is used to generate the indexes (and visual map for reference) used by the TurnKey Hub to find the closest AWS data center for a user. [emphasis mine]
The algorithm in use is further detailed in Finding the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing as well as the follow up post Finding the closest APT package archive using GeoIP and indexing.
While a bit of a gimmick, the visualization is seriously cool and confirms resp. illustrates the reason for the at first sight surprising fact Josh mentioned already, namely that users in Australia currently tend to get better latency via the US West (Northern California / us-west-1) rather than the Asia Pacific (Singapore / ap-southeast-1) region. (Tip: checking Future Cables at the bottom right corner reveals this is likely going to change, which is further detailed in Greg's Cable Map, which indicates Australia might jump between both AWS locations latency wise in the years to come ;)
Meanwhile AWS is providing a helpful map illustrating their Global Infrastructure for a quick assessment, alongside respective details like e.g. number of availability zones and the API endpoint.
More importantly though, AWS has just announced the geographic DNS support Jahufar mentioned already, see the introductory post Multi-Region Latency Based Routing now Available for AWS, which is making available the same latency based routing technology that powers Amazon CloudFront to users of Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, and more.
So in case your environment is comprised of an Auto Scaling EC2 Instances architecture already, simply applying this latency based routing should solve your problem automatically.
While the use case obviously targets offerings spawning multiple AWS regions, the sophisticated features around Latency Based Routing and Weighted Round Robin Record Sets might allow you to determine the desired information more easily yourself as well.
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Try cloudping.info, it will do HTTPS ping from your browser to each AWS region.
Region Latency US-East (Virginia) 28 ms US-West (California) 100 ms US-West (Oregon) 110 ms Europe (Ireland) 100 ms Europe (Frankfurt) 119 ms Asia Pacific (Singapore) 269 ms Asia Pacific (Sydney) 239 ms Asia Pacific (Japan) 209 ms South America (Brazil) 147 ms If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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