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AWS Is Now Available from a Local Zone in Los Angeles
- zknz 7y agoPresumably the first of many. Will they map this to all of their Cloudfront locations eventually?
- julianozen 7y agoCan anyone explain why this is different from a region or an AZ?
- Dunedan 7y agoAn AWS region consists of several availability zones (AZ's) which consist of several data centers running AWS' hardware. Each region is designed in a way that services provided by it can tolerate the loss of a availability zone. A local zone is now something like an additional availability zone with the important difference that it only runs a subset of services of a regular availability zone and doesn't feature its own control plane (which are the services AWS needs to run all this infrastructure including API endpoints, etc.). Instead the control plane of the local zone just runs the so called data plane which is what contains the services used by their customers.
- bithavoc 7y agoAWS is slowly going after StackPath and Cloudflare.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Dunedan 7y agoThat feels like they used the ground work laid with AWS Outposts to enable such smaller auxiliary local zones as well: In both cases the control plane still resides in the "real" region, but the data plane for a local zone and an AWS Outpost is located somewhere else (customer data center or in the case of this local zone somewhere in LAX). I'd even bet that the hardware that they use to power AWS Outposts and such a Local Zone is the same. Of course obviously the scale and the offered services are different.
- someotherone 7y agoThere's definitely similarities, but I could see it being totally different too. Outposts in only 16 racks max; I'd assume this is much more than that. Outposts is for single user and this is for everyone. Billing models presumably differ. Outposts goes in user's DC whereas I assume this is hard connected to AWS network backbone. IDK if making these based on the same infra would be the right abstraction layer.
- jedberg 7y agoThey said during they keynote that they used the outpost technology to make this happen.
- manacit 7y agoDoes anyone have a test IP address for this? I'd love to see how far away it is from where I'm sitting in Southern California right now.
- kitteh 7y agohttp://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ It's on here.
- whalesalad 7y agoOn an OpenBSD box that is hardwired: ping -c 5 70.224.224.253 PING 70.224.224.253 (70.224.224.253): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=0 ttl=235 time=16.018 ms 64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=1 ttl=235 time=13.120 ms 64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=2 ttl=235 time=23.026 ms 64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=3 ttl=235 time=13.656 ms 64 bytes from 70.224.224.253: icmp_seq=4 ttl=235 time=15.517 ms Orange County, Spectrum cable. I used to get sub-10ms to us-east when I lived in Fairfax County, VA.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago> I used to get sub-10ms to us-east when I lived in Fairfax County, VA. AWS East is in Ashburn, VA, just up Route 28 -- a stones throw from Dulles Airport. Not sure if they're still in the Dupont Fabros buildings or the Equinix campus.
- jsjohnst 7y agoOnly four of the data centers that make up us-east-1 are in Ashburn, most are in the surrounding area (Sterling, South Riding, Chantilly, Manassas). If interested, I listed them all out a while back here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876909
- AaronFriel 7y agoWhy is the parent zone for LA us-west2 in Oregon and not us-west1 which is actually in California?
- eropple 7y agoAWS seems to want to discourage the use of us-west-1, which is in San Francisco AFAIK? us-west-2 probably has a lot more capacity. Historically it's tended to be cheaper, too.
- alteria 7y agoIs there a specific reason us-west-1 is more congested? Is it somehow more desirable, or is it just what people pick because they're on the west coast, and it's first on the list?
- tedivm 7y agous-west-1 only has two availability zones available to new customers (they have three total, but one of them only runs legacy customers). From my experience it is also slower to get new hardware and services. My personal belief is that running the "region" is far more expensive than running their other regions. Real estate in the bay area is expensive, as is electricity.
- bitbckt 7y agoIt’s in San Jose.
- eropple 7y agoGood to know. The plant asset costs must merely be staggering instead of eye-bleeding. ;)
- jsjohnst 7y agoUnlikely it’s just San Jose unless there’s only one AZ (and there’s two, plus one for legacy customers only I thought). Each AZ is customarily separated by at least a distance of a few miles.
- keithyjohnson 7y agoWho's excited about this? What's your use case that just became viable because of it? Definitely don't mean these questions in a condescending way, just want to get a read on the pulse from the folks here that will use it :)
- faitswulff 7y agoLos Angeles and stated use case "Media & Entertainment" from the site seems like a big one, but I don't have my finger on the pulse, either.
- kylek 7y agoThis would be my guess too. Probably heavy on storage and encoding (AWS Elemental) gear at the location.
- nemothekid 7y agoThe big use case I see are render farms. Moving terabytes of data can be made incrementally faster if the DC Is physically located closer.
- lalaithion 7y agoUnless there's better bandwidth, this will be on the order of milliseconds.
- Pharaoh2 7y agoIts mostly higher bandwidth from being closer to source. Latency is definitely improved but so is bandwidth if you are in peered in the same exchange. Peek bandwidth is going to be much higher, especially if you are pulling/pushing north of 10G.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoDreamworks are in Glendale and have been experimenting with cloud rendering last I heard. It's always been difficult due to bandwidth and latency bottlenecks. Google has a new facility in the area as well: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/la/ https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/la/
- Scramblejams 7y agoFor my niche use case, I'd love to see this somewhere in the middle of the US so I can have a single instance with similar ping to both coasts.
- luhn 7y agoTry us-east-2, it's located in Ohio.
- yellowapple 7y agocanada-central-1 is also close-ish.
- deftnerd 7y agoOddly enough, ca-central-1 is in Montreal... even further east than their Ohio and Virginia data centers. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ Scroll down to AWS Global Infrastructure Map
- mcbain 7y agoIt seems Central Canada is more philosophical than Geographical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Canada
- Scramblejams 7y agoNope, way too far to the east for what I want.
- jonas21 7y agoI also think of Ohio as being in the middle of the country, so I was surprised to find out that Columbus (where us-east-2 is located) is only about 300 miles from Washington DC, but over 2000 miles from San Francisco.
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- ckdarby 7y agoThis is AWS running Outposts in internet exchanges instead of them building out full datacenters.
- nnx 7y agoThat would be a very sensible way to dogfood Outpost indeed.
- ppierald 7y agoLet's see how much code like this exists: if 'us-west-2' in region: // do it
- nodesocket 7y ago> The new Local Zone in Los Angeles is a logical part of the US West (Oregon). us-west-2-lax-1a Wow, yet more obscure non intuitive naming from AWS. Why not just us-west-3a-local?
- Maxious 7y agoThis allows for us-west-2-sfo-1a
- jsjohnst 7y agoIt’s extremely intuitive, it’s part of the ‘us-west-2’ region, but an extension in ‘lax’ and it’s the first availability zone there ‘1a’. Your suggestion makes no sense, it implies an entirely new region ‘us-west-3’ but with an entirely different naming scheme (no regions have an ‘a’ on the end of them) and the ‘local’ provides zero context about it with no expansion capability.
- dpcx 7y agoI've always loved the "torn-page" look of some of the AWS Blog screenshots - is there a tool to provide this functionality that I don't know about?
- tus88 7y agoDoes this host any actual services, or is it just a quick way to get on the AWS backbone from LA? So it becomes a kind of "Region Endpoint"?
- btgeekboy 7y agoThe blog post contains a list. Quote: “Services – We are launching with support for seven EC2 instance types (T3, C5, M5, R5, R5d, I3en, and G4), two EBS volume types (io1 and gp2), Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre, Application Load Balancer, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Single-Zone RDS is on the near-term roadmap, and other services will come later based on customer demand. Applications running in a Local Zone can also make use of services in the parent region.”
- bob1029 7y agoThis could also be big for web UIs which leverage server-side rendering. I've been ramping our use of blazor server-side for web interfaces, and putting an application server in one of these local zones near where we all work/live could have a really positive impact on perceived performance. Right now, I ping ~50ms out to us-east-1 and things feel "pretty good" in our server-side web UIs. If I could drop this by a factor of 10, we are getting into gaming monitor latency territory, and pure UI state changes could be resolved in timeframes that would be perceptually instantaneous for most users. I.e. things like clicking a button to pop a modal you wouldn't even worry about trying to make a client-side interaction anymore. You'd just wire it up using some trivial @if(showModal) inclusion block on the server-side html page template. Granted, this imposes a pretty harsh geographic constraint if you have just the 1 server, but it is likely feasible to separate the view layer from your persistence/stateful layers, so you could host your view rendering services in multiple local zones, with all the business logic and state kept in one of the primary regions. Not all things can always be instantaneous, but if the UI is highly-responsive there are countless UX approaches for indicating to a user in a friendly way that they simply need to wait for a moment. Being able to build your web UI around blocking calls into business logic seems like a powerful place to be in terms of simplicity and control.
- Corrado 7y agoThis would be exciting but I'm already having trouble managing subnets and this just makes it worse. If these new Local Zones support IPv6 then that makes it much easier to plan and support new networks.