We learned something today: Amazon EC2 wasn’t available in Europe up until today. That’s news to us, because we thought it already was. Amazon Web Services just released a statement announcing that European developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances locally.
With today’s launch, European developers and businesses with European customers can take advantage of the latest features for Amazon EC2 including multiple Availability Zones, Elastic IP addresses, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). In the near future, Amazon EC2 will also add support for Windows Server and SQL Server in the EU which is a new feature that was recently introduced on Amazon EC2 in the U.S.
Amazon S3 had already been available for about a year in the EU, but it’s good to see the popular cloud computing service making its way across the Atlantic now, too.
For some reason, the prices for Amazon EC2 usage in Europe were mentioned in US dollars, so I took the liberty to convert them to Euro currency for our European readers:
Standard (per instance hour consumed)
€0.085 for small instances
€0.34 for large instances
€0.68 for x-large instances
High CPU (per instance hour consumed)
€0.17 for medium instances
€0.68 for x-large instances
Data Transfer
€0.077 per GB – all data transfer in
€0.13 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
€0.1 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
€0.085 per GB – next 100TB
€0.077 per GB – over 150T
If you’d like to compare this to US pricing, click here. Amazon says the prices in Europe are a bit higher because the increasing cost of running datacenters on the continent.
Update: I just had a chat with an Amazon representative and he confirmed the complete infrastructure is actually located in Ireland.
The update actually refers to EU-based instances. That is, datacenters in Europe.
locally? you mean the data-centers are in Europe?
Yep, they are in europe. (the service has always been accessible worldwide, but all servers were US based, while S3 was US and Europe)
Yeah, we ran US located instance from EU for a while, the news is the “Availability Zone” now provided in Europe for Ec2 * => ie: data center in europe
But, anyway, that’s a pretty pretty good news !
This is pretty cool news, for a few european legal reasons related to privacy it’s easier collecting user personal data if you store it in europe
Doesn’t actually matter the least bit… Poland, Germany and maybe others require you to host you’re servers in the respective country… Europe is not Europe if you know what I mean… and I doubt Amazon having set up data centers in all European countries.
The whole infrastructure is located in Ireland, updated the post.
What kind of requirements are that?
There is none that requires you to run a server for a business in the designated country.
There are however different regulations in regard to working with data (or for web2 pros: UGC). I doubt this update addresses any of that. For a business from Europe EC2/S3, GAE and so on are still not usable in its current state.
till,
US privacy regulations are -according to the EU- not at the same strict level of privacy. So hosting private data in the US can bring legal troubles.
However all (if not, most) EU countries and few other (I think Canada was one of those) have similar levels of privacy regulations and therefore one can host without trouble or additional permisions.
In Spain I have not heard of any case of company being sued because of hosting in the US, however if the data privacy agency begins to look into this issue, fines of up to EUR 600.000 can be placed.
As I said. Per se, there is no law that requires that. For example, I can rent a dedicated server (physical hardware) in the U.S. and host my European clients on there. I can also ship hardware to the U.S., and colocate etc..
With cloud computing it’s different, primarily because the providers (GAE, EC2/S3, …) do not guarantee that the data you delete on your instance, is really deleted within their system. And that’s the subtle (important) difference.
One thing to take into account is the type of data, for example – as long as it’s my own website, files, etc. then there is no issue. If I run a social network and my customers upload files etc., then cloud computing is not suitable.
How about Asia Pacific? I’m looking forward about this.
What about Latin America? If not, are there any reputable companies offering such services in the region?
Finally Amazon has realized that going regional and focusing on the special needs of that location than global is the best shot in recession. They should have read http://www.nichea.info
Excellent!
I wonder when they will launch FPS in Europe? Does anyone know?
Good news.
But what I’d be more interested in is : have they increased the Bandwidth capacity between s3 and EC2?
At the moment, there’s no easy way to use Amazon S3+EC2 for mass video streaming ; if I’m not mistaken, the max bandwidth for a LARGE instance is about 450mb/s, which is simply not enough if you plan to stream live content to a huge audience… (it simply becomes too expensive and complicated)
It’s not in “Euros”, it’s in “Euro”
Great!
But the Eu could do with access to devpay and the use of a Solo card payment structure.
Pre-pay would also be good.
Readers should also take a look at the two existing European clouds: ElasticHosts (ourselves, http://www.elastichosts.com) and FlexiScale. Compared to Amazon, ElasticHosts offers lower prices when bought by subscription, fully flexible server sizings and full control over your operating system installation.