[AusNOG] Announcing the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region

[Yun Huang Yong]

You might find it interesting to watch some of the keynotes & customer 
case studies / testimonials at 
http://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices/videos?view=0

The recurring theme, even mentioned by Commbank at AWS's Customer 
Appreciation Day event yesterday, is flexibility.

That's not just about turning services on but also *off* when you don't 
need them.

Besides scaling with production load (again, up & down) it also gives 
organisations the ability to do things like spin up a complete test 
infrastructure, run tests, then shut the whole thing down.  It might 
cost them $x00s in running costs for a few hours/days vs $x,000s to keep 
that same infrastructure available 24x7 even when it's not used.

But making it possible to do that sort of thing requires some automation 
so using cloud services in this way is not exactly free either if you 
consider developer time.

One of the gotchas about comparing traditional hosting to something like 
AWS is that you don't architect services the same way.  With any design 
you make a bunch of assumptions about your (and your vendors') 
capabilities and design within those limitations.

As an example you might design for traditional hosting on the assumption 
that deployment times may be days/weeks, maybe months.  In contrast you 
can spin up AWS services in minutes.  OTOH, if as you say your hosting 
costs are much lower than AWS, that's certainly something to factor into 
your design choices.

Neither is better or worse.  They are simply different and thus suit 
different use cases.

Maybe the easiest way to get some appreciation of the benefits as well 
as the downsides (and there are plenty!) is to try it out.  AWS has a 
free service tier: http://aws.amazon.com/free/

No I don't work for Amazon :)

On 14/11/2012 1:39 PM, ausnog (321) wrote:
> Agreeing with your answer/calc and add the comment that even at lower
> quantities the numbers just don’t stack up, they are expensive compared
> to other existing local solution. I used 26TB as we sell/host heaps of
> these and to good sized businesses as well.
>
> My question was meant to also understand why others on the list thought
> it was good value as I just don’t see it, ie why all the excitement?
>
> Cheers
>
> Steve
>
> *From:*ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
> <mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net>
> [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net]
> <mailto:[mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net]> *On Behalf Of *Joshua
> D'Alton
> *Sent:* Wednesday, 14 November 2012 11:16 AM
> *To:* ausnog at lists.ausnog.net <mailto:ausnog at lists.ausnog.net>
> *Subject:* Re: [AusNOG] Announcing the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region
>
> Yes the price for 5000TB over 3 years is more than 15 million, yet the
> hardware would cost less than 2mill, add in racking and bandwidth it
> might rise to 5 mil, but nowhere near 10 let alone 15.
>
> Anyway, AWS isn't used by penny pinchers :D
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 11:13 AM, ausnog (321) <ausnog at 321.com.au
> <mailto:ausnog at 321.com.au>> wrote:
>
> Morning all,
>
> My first impression of the rates is a bit contrary to others on this
> thread. Specifically,  I don’t see them as great value for data storage
> if you are using them for off-site storage.
>
> Two caveats to my comment are:
> -       assuming that you are using AWS for off-site backup then you
> just need a good NAS (we set this up as NAS with Raid 6 plus 1 spare
> giving 26TB usable space, good performance and resilience with option to
> replicate to multi datacentres/locations) in 2ru.
> -       Even if you are using AWS as highly available clustered storage
> they are still not that well priced by our price book.
>
> Even using their online price calculator 26TB of usable space (standard
> storage) costs $2,856.70pm or $34,280.40pa or $102,841.20 over 3 years
> and it’s not hard to do better than that.
>
> What am I missing?
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
> <mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net>
> [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
> <mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net>] On Behalf Of Emily Ozols
> Sent: Wednesday, 14 November 2012 9:33 AM
> To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net <mailto:ausnog at lists.ausnog.net>
> Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Announcing the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region
>
> I just read their prices this morning and I'm astounded as how low
> they've kept them.
> They have to be selling at a loss.
> http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
> Just check them out here.
>
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Joshua D'Alton <joshua at railgun.com.au
> <mailto:joshua at railgun.com.au>> wrote:
>  > This could make some impact re the peering thread at least on a
>  > national scale. hmmm
>  >
>  > -----------------------------
>  > Dear AWS Customer,
>  >
>  > We are excited to announce the immediate availability of our new Asia
>  > Pacific (Sydney) Region.
>  >
>  > Starting today, customers can run their applications and workloads in
>  > the new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region to reduce latency to end-users
>  > based in Australia and New Zealand while avoiding the up-front
>  > expenses, long-term commitments, and scaling challenges associated
>  > with maintaining and operating their own infrastructure. Sydney joins
>  > Singapore and Tokyo as the third Region in Asia Pacific and as the
> ninth Region worldwide.
>  >
>  > AWS’s new Sydney
>  >
>  >
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>  >
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>
>
> --
> ~Em
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