Spouting Shite

EC2 reaches Europe (Ireland)

Over the past few weeks I have been working over in Ireland with some potential xSP partners (both ISP’s and data center providers). It is great to see that the Irish data center providers are very busy with most of them approaching capacity. Many of my contacts in Dublin commented that Amazon seem to be buying up quite a bit of space in several co-lo buildings and we speculated if the space was to be used by S3 or CloudFront. I didn’t expect that it was for EC2 EU! Amazon announced the release of EC2 EU yesterday.  

Amazon has a policy of not announcing where they locate their servers, but I can assume from the chatter I have heard in the market that they are hosted in Dublin.  I am not the only person who is speculating that EC2 EU is in Ireland.

Co-lo space in Europe is much more expensive than that in the US, so it’s not surprising that the EU services are 10% more expensive than the US services.

What is interesting is that the US and EU clouds are completely separate…the only thing that they share is the login credentials. If you have installations in the US then launching instances in the EU will involve the copying over of your AMI’s and the creating of new SSH keys. Thorsten from RightScale has some very interesting comments regarding the reasoning behind the complete separation of the US and EU clouds:

The EC2 EU announcement is very significant in a way that may not be entirely obvious at first glance: it’s a separate EC2 deployment and tied as little as possible to the current US EC2 installation. The reason for this is simple: availability. The two installations basically share nothing other than the account credentials such that a massive failure in one is extremely unlikely to affect the other in any way. As a result EC2 users now have many levels of redundancy available to them: they can run services on multiple instances for local redundancy, they can split servers up into multiple availability zones within one region, and now a secondary or disaster recovery site can be set-up in another region. With RightScale we’re further making it possible to use multiple cloud providers to gain yet another level of redundancy. Sweet!

Having EC2 in Europe opens up a few questions regarding privacy, gambling and the US Patriot Act. While each company will need to analyze these separately it would seem that gambling is now OK (unless it is blocked in the AWS AUP), holding European data is now OK as it will not go off to the US but the actual servers are still covered under the Patriot act (because they are owned by Amazon which is a US company). I am sure that answers to these questions will come out over the next few weeks.