This morning I received the email from Amazon saying that they are now providing EC2 instances in Europe. It had been on the radar due to the Twitter Cloud Community talking about it pretty quick.
As with the other Amazon AWS services available in European data centres, the pricing is slightly higher than if you are using the US based AWS locations. This will mean you need to make a good close look at the performance vs. price calculations before using the EU instances.
Having EC2 instances available in Europe is good if you have applications that are time sensitive and latency is an issue. Amazon are clever but can’t change the laws of physics, so talking to a server in the USA from London will always be slower than talking to a server in Europe (if we exclude network factors and look solely and miles from point A to point B).
The instances in Europe do not yet have the MS Windows functionality that the US based service can provide already, but it will be a matter of time till it is available.
This announcement is probably very good news for people looking to extend their “internal cloud” to Amazon’s AWS services but have concerns about latency. For those developing web based applications it is probably less exciting as the CloudFront product is perhaps more relevant for delivering performance to end users.
It is of course interesting as it provides more geographically close competition to the regional providers such as FlexiScale.
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