Comparing Amazon EC2 Regions
December 16th, 2009 | Published in Analysis | 8 Comments
Two weeks ago, Amazon announced the launch of a new N. California region, us-west-1. This is now the third region in Amazon’s portfolio, following the N. Virginia-based us-east-1 region and the Ireland-based eu-west-1. I got curious to see how fast the new region was being adopted. Luckily, with the Anatomy of an Amazon EC2 Resource ID formula at hand, we can zone in on this data this quite easily.
To the results!
First, a plot of the instance counts for each region rising over the course of the day and a half sampled.
Next, a more direct comparison of the count of instances launched per day.
Conclusions?
- us-west-1 is a great success. Just two weeks after its official launch its level of activity is 73% of eu-west-1, which has been around for a whole year!
- us-east-1 continues to maintain a giant (and unsurprising) lead. We can also observe that its numbers are in the same range as the measurements back in September.
It will be interesting to see when (in my opinion it’s “when” not “if”) us-west-1 surpasses eu-west-1. It will probably not take too long. What is more intriguing is to try and guess the relative sizes, say, 1 year from now. Will us-east-1 retain its lead? While it enjoys its status as the default for AWS operations, the new region will definitely put up a fight due to its proximity to the California-centered tech industry.
One segment, applications with Salesforce integration, were up to now severely limited due to Salesforce’s datacenter being located in California and Amazon’s in Virginia. Many chose simply not to go for AWS. The new region now provides this segment with low-latency communications between EC2 and Salesforce. This segment alone may turn out to be a significant factor in the growth of us-west-1.
I’ll continue to follow from time to time. AWS are planning some new Asia regions in 2010, first Singapore and then Japan, so there will definitely be lots of data to keep us busy!
Happy Holidays!
December 16th, 2009 at 8:23 pm (#)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by garnaat, Guy Rosen. Guy Rosen said: New post: Comparing Amazon EC2 Regions – http://bit.ly/5fjdOz <- AWS us-west-1 region already at 73% of eu-west-1! [...]
December 16th, 2009 at 10:11 pm (#)
The graph on the top is just for one day, right? Because it seems that EU and US-west are deploying servers at relatively the same speed.
However, if it has grown linearly over the past two weeks (it probably didn’t), than it adds about 11852/14=~850 more servers a day than the day before (while EU is probably closer to static in size). You can expect it will catch up in another week or so.
(If you have data for more than a day, I’d love to see it).
December 16th, 2009 at 10:24 pm (#)
@Omer – the graph is just for a single day. I too doubt that it would be linear. Remember that although it launched officially just two weeks before, it may have been in a private beta for a while, not to mention internal Amazon systems (who knows how many instances per day are launched, or at least the counter incremented, just for these?).
Here are some numbers to think about. Although one of the “magic numbers” in the formula is partially unknown for us-west (need more data), at its most conservative possibility the calculation shows that approximately 250,000 instances were launched in total as of Dec 14th. Now find the function :-)
December 18th, 2009 at 5:35 pm (#)
[...] Rosen at Jack of All Clouds has an early analysis of adoption of the new West Coast availability zone on EC2 with existing [...]
December 18th, 2009 at 8:25 pm (#)
Guy – Great job as usual. Can you explain more the comment on apps with Salesforce.com integration? That’s very intriguing. How do you know which apps have salesforce.com integration and what exactly do you mean by that?
Geva
December 19th, 2009 at 3:32 pm (#)
Geva – I don’t externally count apps with or without Salesforce integration, this is mere conjecture on my part following a couple of conversations with companies who decided not to host on EC2 specifically because of the “distance” between EC2 and Salesforce.
Now that the us-west-1 region is available latency between apps and Salesforce should be drastically lower, making it much easier to move data between these two cloud giants.
December 21st, 2009 at 12:42 am (#)
[...] Rosen at Jack of All Clouds has an early analysis of adoption of the new West Coast availability zone on EC2 with existing [...]
January 20th, 2010 at 12:43 am (#)
The East zone is cheaper than West and Eu zones. That may factor in a bit