[tlug] The cloud comes to Tokyo

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

Amazon AWS now has a Tokyo data centre (press release below). Tokyo is
more expensive than EU and Singapore, but only slightly more. E.g. a
"Large" EC2 instance is $0.34/hr in U.S., $0.38/hr in Ireland/Singapore
and $0.40/hr in Tokyo.
For S3, the price comparison for tier 2 usage (1-49TB) is:
$0.125/GB/month in U.S.(Virginia), Ireland and Singapore, $0.135 in
Tokyo and $0.139 in N. California.

For projects where low latency matters the Tokyo data centre could be
quite attractive. (Not to mention the emotional appeal of "Your data and
servers will be in Japan.")

I think AWS works out very expensive for 24/7 hosting, but for bursts
and uneven usage it is nice. And for websites where income is
proportional to hits ('cos expenses only rise when income does). I think
you can shop around and save a little, but not much, and Amazon
apparently has 90% of this market [1].

Darren

[1]: Source: Economist article I can't find now. But see e.g.
http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2011/02/how-big-is-the-cloud-computing-market/
Great quote: "In terms of market share Amazon is Coke and there isn't
yet a Pepsi,"


--------------------------------

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of our new Asia
Pacific (Tokyo) Region!

Starting today, Japan-based businesses and global companies with
customers in Japan can run their applications and workloads in the new
Tokyo Region to reduce latency to end-users, keep their data entirely in
Japan, and avoid the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with
maintaining and operating their own infrastructure. In most cases, end
users in Japan can now experience single digit millisecond latency from
AWS's new Tokyo Region. Tokyo joins Singapore as our second Asia Pacific
location and as our fifth infrastructure location worldwide.

We are also pleased to announce the availability of Japanese language
for support. AWS customers now have access to the features of AWS Basic
and Premium Support in Japanese. AWS Basic Support provides free access
to a Resource Center, Technical FAQ's and Developer Forums. AWS Premium
Support is a one-on-one, fast-response support channel that is staffed
24x7x365 with experienced technical support engineers. All AWS Premium
Support plans offer customers an unlimited number of support cases, with
pay-by-the-month pricing and no long term contracts.

In addition, in the coming months AWS plans to provide options for
billing in Japanese Yen.

Our new Tokyo Region currently supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon
SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple
Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon
SNS), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon
CloudFront. Tokyo Region pricing is available on the detail page of each
service, at http://aws.amazon.com/products/ or
http://aws.amazon.com/jp/products (in Japanese).


-- 
Darren Cook, Software Researcher/Developer

http://dcook.org/work/ (About me and my work)
http://dcook.org/blogs.html (My blogs and articles)