AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region | Hacker News Reader

AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region

aws.amazon.com

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More info at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-asia-pacific-m...

While this is good news, AWS really ought to work on (a) competitive pricing, and (b) flexibility in cpu/ram customization. Today, google compute instances cost less than half of similar AWS instances and allow customization of ram and cpu.

I'm curious to know how Google gets efficient usage of their hardware when people are choosing weird RAM/CPU combos. Do you know if they have released any information on this?

Ok, we changed the URL to that from https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/06/announcin....

Do you ever sleep? Or is your account used in shifts by a number of people in a moderation team? I'm genuinely curious.

My account's only used by me.

I noticed Digital Ocean added an India datacentre too - https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/introducing-our-ba...

I migrated a droplet from Singapore to Bangalore on the 12th. It hosts a site that was averaging ~ 15k page views per day, predominantly Indian traffic (banking recruitment guide). Since then, the traffic has been rising steadily and yesterday crossed an all-time high of 26k page views. (No other changes made to the site)

What could explain the increase in traffic? Higher visitor retention due to improved page load performance?

does Google take server location into account when showing search results? edit: seems they might. This is a probable cause for the increase in your traffic

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

Yes, I have experienced this several times before.

You can check my comments on this recent thread for a somewhat more detailed account of my observations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11984673

Server response rate seems to be very slow.

From India?

Microsoft Azure had already (Edit: actually three) datacentres in India:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/

This completely confirms the region as a technological hub moving forward.

Microsoft Azure had already (Edit: actually three) datacentres in India:

India is Microsoft tech heavy (things change though).

Funny story. A few years back, I got a call from one of their Azure BizDev reps. I told them I was happy they supported Linux and the guy wanted to hang up so fast...lol!

Point of fact: An AWS region is actually more than one DC. Mumbai has two availability zones which implies at least two DCs.

Also, Azure India regions are not generally available:

"The India regions are available to volume licensing customers and partners with a local enrollment in India. The India regions will open to direct online Azure subscriptions in 2016."

Slightly OT but Azure is such a better product than AWS. I was really skeptical because Microsoft has a legacy of doing an absolute shit job at all their copycat products. I happened into some credit and gave it a try during some downtime and was extremely pleasantly surprised. It's as if somebody applied a 2016 interface and usability to AWS.

Are you kidding me? I find azures interface to be completely horrible. AWS interface isn't great but azures interface is no better.

GCE on the other hand has a very nice interface.

GCE has an interface that is painfully slow at times though. It's a complete slouch compared to the speed of the AWS interface.

New redesign is atrocious, but I really liked their old design.

It seems you are just talking about the UI of the web interface to the services. I agree this is an important feature that AWS doesn't do so well with. But in the end it's also has pretty much nothing to do with the underlying functionality of the services themselves.

My use case (VDI) might be slightly different than a lot of others but it's not just the UI.

I think this might be a case of "beauty in the eye of the beer holder". Azure's web UI (both the old one and the new one) is an abomination of the sort I've come to expect from MSFT design teams.

Their third-party mysql db offerings are atrocious, price-wise.

Have you tried to leverage Azure IaaS, or Azure Blob at any scale?

This is great news. I work at a major ecommerce player in India and we use AWS extensively, mostly from Singapore region. There have been internal discussions multiple times to move to a provider within India to prevent downtimes in case of an undersea cable cut or to gain the extra few fractions of a second in page load times but we always chose AWS for the flexibility it provides. Been waiting for this for a while!

Snapdeal? Last time I checked with them, they were hosting their infra partially on AWS and rest in their own DC.

Also helps with regulatory stuff

Flipkart ?

Nope. Flipkart's entire setup is in Netmagic's (An NTT Communications company) datacenters as per my knowledge.

Not anymore. They've built their own DC and moved away from NM.

Flipkart is known not to use AWS (in production), because of being their primary competitor.

Looks like all those billions Jeff Bezos is investing in India are trickling into AWS infrastructure as well. This is good news for others; Singapore was their closest zone for Indian consumers. I always wanted an availability zone here in India.

looks like pricing is costlier than EU / US

I guess most places outside of EU/US have an increased price

US-East is the cheapest one and it seems to be the one everybody picks first. I can only guess how the capacity there compares to other datacenters

Also you can expect higher costs for hardware and infrastructure in places like India and Brazil

us-east-1 and us-west-2 pricing is locked to each other. Typically the power differences are related to the cost of power and transit/peering, not the capital of building the facilities.

Northern Virginia and Oregon have (generally) cheap power and cheap connectivity to anywhere in the world, with plenty of peering opportunities. In a developing country or with more expensive infrastructure (Mumbai, Tokyo) costs will be higher to get power and pull in fiber to peering locations with enough capacity to supply a provider of Amazon's size.

This is the correct analysis. Power costs are high in India and its often unreliable, requiring many industries to have expensive generators in place as backup.

But it's a bit cheaper than Singapore. For EC2, it appears to be ~5% cheaper!

Anyone know what the AWS China pricing is like? There does not seem to be anything on the web sites for S3 or EC2. None of the calculator sites seems to have China in their list.

And maybe its time for the Asia region to be broken away from Pacific (but keep both). Mumbai associated with Pacific introduces dissonance.

May be related: if hosting in China, you need an ICP license. Can't just open a shop or instance (in general... if Amazon have a way of getting around this, would be interesting).

Basically, while you can power-up a server in a datacenter, it shouldn't be accessed publicly via DNS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license

The commercial/business sense of the term Asia-Pacific almost always include India; so the dissonance argument isn't really valid.

This is the China homepage: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/

I have been there but unfortunately no pricing info under EC2 or S3. Checked the product details link and FAQ links. Nothing.

Likely related to ensuring power systems are reliably guaranteed to stay available.

Is Mumbai really in Asia Pacific? India doesn't touch the Pacific. In fact, it touches an entirely different ocean named after it.

Well it's definitely in Asia.

To me it makes no sense to lump such a huge area together under "asia-pacific" though. Even just Asia would be too big.

Asia Pacific means all of Asia plus the Pacific countries like Australia and the scattered islands in the pacific.

It's generally not considered to include Western Asia/the Middle East, though.

Middle East is generally merged with Europe and Africa and called EMEA (Europe/Middle-East/Africa)

Depends on context - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia-Pacific

Earth has more than one ocean?

I guess your model\map might, so perhaps with these tools you can get insight into your question.

https://bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/dymaxion-world/dymaxi...

http://www.cartotalk.com/index.php?showtopic=9406

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe

Usually it counts as part of the Indian Subcontinent Region IIRC?

I'm really curious about the power infrastructure they use within their DC to guarantee availability. Even when I was in a very nice part of Delhi there were frequent brown outs.

Industries get 24 hrs guaranteed power. It is the regular consumers that get timed power cuts.

I am on a industrial connection and I only faced two failure power cuts in this year and I live in a major Indian city.

Completely false. Across three factories in two states, I don't get "guaranteed" power. In fact, the only place I see basically uninterrupted power is in the nice parts of residential Bombay.

Well, my firm has sold Gensets to Amazon and other Data centers. (I don't know if we sold to their Mumbai AWS facility)

Every data center keeps on site generators to deal with power shortages. I think its part of the standard design paradigm (world wide).

Mumbai has stable power whereas in Delhi brownouts are relatively common occurrences.

Its kinda funny to have this pop up anywhere on HN.

Mumbai has no power issue. In the last 10 years I have lived here, I have never witnessed load shedding. It is because last mile is served by private power companies namely Tata and Reliance power. This makes power slightly costlier but a hell lot more reliable. We also have underground cables to the last mile so there are no surges

All of their datacenters around the world have batteries and diesel generators. They don't trust the local power anywhere.

In Australia, AWS was beaten by actual clouds recently.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/web-chaos-m...

IT parks manage with more regular power and, of course, generators.

I am sure a DC like this will be able to manage in India :)

Oh my, waiting for this announcement forever! I was always anxious about the fact that so much data from Indian users had to be hosted outside.

I'm based in the Middle East and was really looking forward to this since announcement we use the Singapore region and currently get 105ms pings to our instances. Yet, how come I get 135ms pings to Mumbai despite it being MUCH closer (~1930km vs 5840km to Singapore) ?

Lol. I am in South India, and when gaming, i frequently get better ping to Singapore than other parts of India; Also performance varies widely depending on my ip and the time of the day. The routing in local isps is atrocious. I thought the situation would be different for commercial connections but your experience seems to suggest otherwise.

Run traceroute and see where it's going.

Doesn't look good at Mumbai:

  6    39 ms    39 ms    39 ms  ix-xe-9-0-1-0.tcore2.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net [180.87.39.57]
  7    40 ms    39 ms    39 ms  if-ae-2-2.tcore1.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net [180.87.38.1]
  8   131 ms   123 ms   124 ms  180.87.38.6
  9   141 ms   135 ms   134 ms  115.114.89.118.static-Mumbai.vsnl.net.in [115.114.89.118]
 10   143 ms   136 ms   183 ms  52.95.66.176
 11   139 ms   136 ms   136 ms  52.95.66.197
 12   124 ms   124 ms   123 ms  52.95.67.208
 13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16   136 ms   136 ms   136 ms  <Instance IP>

Whereas for Singapore:

  6   145 ms   154 ms   146 ms  38895.sgw.equinix.com [27.111.228.215]
  7    94 ms   102 ms    92 ms  52.93.8.10
  8    94 ms    92 ms    92 ms  52.93.8.29
  9   106 ms   104 ms   104 ms  203.83.223.31
 10   107 ms   104 ms   104 ms  <Instance IP>

What is your src IP? Both 52.95.67.208 and 203.83.223.31 are less than 80ms for me from Mumbai.

~10ms from Tata and Airtel in Pune. Anyone got latency from Vodafone and MTNL?

if anyone wants a IP to ping or tracert, use below

  server-54-230-174-13.bom2.r.cloudfront.net

btw 70 ms avg ping from LK, not bad

From BLR over an ACT line: ~25ms

From BLR over an Airtel line: ~65ms

From Taiwan (google compute instance): ~112ms

Do you have the same for Singapore region. (to compare latency)

50ms Nagpur Tata line

70 ms for blr digitalocean 90-110 ms for Singapore DO

120-140 ms for European DC like OVH & online.net

Finally, it getting closer bringing so much hopes.

Thanks aws team.

Great news, indeed!

I was hoping to see one more region in Chennai or Hyderabad.

This is great news. Sites hosted in India load much quicker than ones hosted abroad.

Hope that Google Cloud Platform follows suit and arrives in India soon.

Will Indian startups start migrating their DC's to Mumbai region?

The primary consideration for DC location is where your customers are located. If a startup is focused on the US market, such a move would make no sense. So, as with anything engineering, it depends.

Yes! We are right now testing to see if there are any issues. Will move soon afterwards hopefully.

We are definitely migrating. We were forced not to use AWS so far due to regulatory issues with data needing to reside in India. Long awaited!

It would be great if there was an API that lists the AWS regions. Currently it is up to the developer to maintain a hard coded list somewhere.

There is an API available http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/API_De...

If you are using the Java API, there is an enum Regions in the com.amazonaws.regions package.

That would be a hard-coded list. hoodoof means something that'd dynamically tell you what existed, not just what happened to exist when your copy of the AWS library was released.

Patiently waiting for App Engine to announce the same too.Just waiting..

Today, AWS has announced the general availability of its new India region, which should come as no surprise to any avid cloud engineer. AWS is not a new concept to India with its set of early adopters harnessing and driving cloud usage in the country for many years. As with all regional expansions, AWS must develop a highly knowledgeable and skilled local technical community. To help drive this process, Cloud Academy is excited to announce an introductory offer for Indian residents to celebrate the launch of the AWS India region.

http://cloudacademy.com/blog/new-aws-indian-region-cloud-aca...

So, more air pollution in Mumbai?

x + 1000 ~ x as x → ∞

lets move it to my place (Nepal) then （｡>‿‿<｡）

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