All Internet traffic in and out of Israel goes through three undersea cables connecting the country with Turkey, Greece, and Italy, and as such suffer from the kind of lag that happens when you're separated from your destination server by a couple thousand kilometers, usually more. There are no local cloud providers and the local entrepreneurial culture (which is MASSIVE for such a small country) either has to pay for cloud resources in Europe or has to pay for local non-cloud hosting, which is orders of magnitude more expensive and running on relatively ancient hardware (the local VPS shops have little incentive to upgrade).
Do we have to beg for Amazon to come here?!
> (the local VPS shops have little incentive to upgrade)
> Do we have to beg for Amazon to come here?!
I'm surprised nobody has stepped in and built out their own cloud offering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
In the Middle East there are several markets larger than Israel, and putting a region in Israel will probably not be tenable for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the like.
There is no region in Africa...
Russia & Eastern Europe is not that well served...
Fast connections there are also few and far between in the Middle East and Africa. In Israel, LTE is ubiquitous in urban areas, most residences have either DOCSIS 3.0 or Fiber-to-the-curb, and a nationwide FTTH infrastructure is being built out currently. Domestic connections are great - the problem is just that almost nothing is hosted domestically.
Eastern Europe / Western Russia sounds like a good idea to me, although I'm not familiar with their local Internet topologies.
Currently Ireland vs. Frankfurt is (more data needed of course)[2]:
Europe (Ireland): 25 ms 27 ms 24 ms
Europe (Frankfurt): 39 ms 39 ms 42 ms
But for a quick test, this looks like a good tool: http://www.cloudping.info/
Will be interested to test this once released to see UK / Paris vs. Dublin.
[1] Article states UK region "due in coming months". No location announced?
[2] Hitting ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com vs. ec2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-in-2017-new-aws-regi...
If you run a data heavy service, PoP inside the UK or Ireland is a must if you want to avoid throttling and heavy-handed traffic shapping.
(To Ireland) --- dynamodb.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com ping statistics --- 100 packets transmitted, 100 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 15.306/22.425/63.455/9.655 ms
To Softlayer Paris: --- speedtest.par01.softlayer.com ping statistics --- 100 packets transmitted, 100 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 12.082/16.196/54.741/7.652 ms
[0] https://unop.uk/azure-eu-regions-naming-confusion
[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/introducing-our-lo...
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure
[3] http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2015/11/aws-announces-uk...
I expect Microsoft are using the UN region names for Europe, where Britain are Ireland are part of Northern Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme_for_E...
At the bottom of the English section it says it's London
The new European region, coupled with the existing AWS Regions in Dublin and Frankfurt, and a future one in London,
It's not a great situation, having everything so centralised on London, but it's a small enough country that it doesn't have a huge effect on latency. It would make no sense for AWS to locate in a non-London region when everything would then have to be backhauled to London.
> Today, I am excited to add the United Kingdom to that list! The AWS UK region will be our third in the European Union (EU), and we're shooting to have it ready by the end of 2016 (or early 2017). This region will provide even lower latency and strong data sovereignty to local users.
[1] http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2015/11/aws-announces-uk...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-in-2017-new-aws-regi...
> This will be the fourth AWS Region in Europe. We currently have two other Regions in Europe — EU (Ireland) and EU (Frankfurt) and an additional Region in the UK expected to launch in the coming months.
Shouldn't it at least be mentioned in the announcement that the french government can pretty much ask Amazon for any of your data without a warrant. Or is the situation better than a year ago?
EDIT: Warrant is apparently needed as noplay said.
But it's probably not a good idea to host in France if you have not reason to do that. Like NSA, french secret service just don't care about laws. But if you target french customer that's good news you have one more alternative for hosting without trouble with regulation about data.
The last extension is effective since 2016-07-26 and is supposed to last 6 months.
I guess "government" interprets to different things in different countries, what I wrote above is a very american viewpoint.
In my country (SE), a member of government can be relieved of her duties if she even mentions that an agency should act in a certain way (as the government only should make up policies and not interfere in the daily businesses of the agencies).
Our platform is very mature now I wish more folks would give it a shot.
p.s. we also take EU people data privacy very seriously. https://www.thefastmode.com/technology-solutions/9077-micros...
Hmmm. I find that very hard to believe.
MS is going to have to be _very_ good for a _long_ time to overcome firing the late Caspar Bowden (then MS' chief privacy adviser) for telling regional managers that the NSA can pwn their customers' data. https://twitter.com/casparbowden/status/542588420611379201
Currently it is an incredibly inefficient design of a service management trying to do everything yet many are dependent for using it.
In a U.S. AWS data center, I am very confident (right now) that my encryption keys and encrypted data will never be given out to any governmental agency. Even with a warrant, they can not access my data unencrypted.
What will Amazon do when the French government says hand us all of your keys or else...
As our data is all extremely sensitive financial information, we really can not even take that chance until we know.
Clarification: We send all data over HTTPS with AES 256 encryption. If authorities have a warrant for data, can we hand them the encrypted data and say the keys are in the U.S. and we can't give them to you?
1) Keeping keys to extremely sensitive financial data on a cloud server
2) Confident that the US government won't request this information through warrant or national security letter
3) Asking for advice about this on a message board?
2) Well lately, I'm not. The Apple/FBI case was somewhat assuring. And I believe that to date, AWS has not handed over any data or keys without permission.
3) More theoretical advice about the new French region. What are the laws about privacy and how will that work. We just saw what Germany ruled on with WhatsApp. And really just asking the question because it needs to be asked. I don't actually expect an ultimate answer, just discussion about it.
Comparing with the US I don't remember that France has any gag laws.
This might also allow for mixing critical server roles hosted in other Paris data centers with AWS.
I'm thinking about connecting a web server (in AWS) with a DB server (in another Paris DC) while keeping the latency at a low level.
For bonus points, choose the same DC that AWS is actually in http://www.equinix.com/locations/france-colocation/france-da...