24 ms·

AWS Region Coming to New Zealand

184 points by jeffbarr 5y ago

byoung2 5y ago
I'm amazed by how much the list of regions has gotten over the years. Most companies I've worked for have only used at most 2 regions for EC2, more for S3. Aside from Cloudfront, are there use cases you've seen for having compute in every region?
- itisit 5y ago
  A lot of businesses like to have their cloud ops located in and subject to the laws of the country said businesses are based in.
  - dangerboysteve 5y ago
    governments as well.
    - xupybd 5y ago
      Yes many hosting companies in NZ rely on that. It's going to be hard for them to keep their niche.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- ctvo 5y ago
  Depends on your architecture. You're still restricted by physics with edge computing. If you need to make a call back into us-east-1 to get data out of a data store, it doesn't matter that there's an edge CDN and API layer. Outside of that, there's compliance reasons too. Partitioning your data by region because storing customer information in say the EU is different than the US. More likely CN is much different than the rest of the world if you do business there.
  - dilyevsky 5y ago
    It does in fact matter that your tcp packets are roundtripping over lower rtt connection even if you do have to fetch from the origin
- mrkurt 5y ago
  There are many use cases for compute in every (or at least, 3+) regions. But it's very difficult to manage. So difficult that most things that would benefit can't afford the complexity.
- jamesfinlayson 5y ago
  Redundancy, but I don't know how easy AWS makes it to run say, a container, in two different regions. I think their load balancers can balance between regions but I'm not sure how well other services can do it.
  - byoung2 5y ago
    What comes to mind is DNS based load balancing. You'd have a full stack running in each region, and users get routed to the one nearest them. I could see this working for something like Dropbox or an email service where users can be easily segmented.
    - dilyevsky 5y ago
      You can do that or you can use their Global Accelerator thingy that gives you an anycast IP but technically they dont have an lb that spans regions (nor would you probably want one)
      - jamesfinlayson 5y ago
        Yeah I think I was thinking of the Route 53 based region load balancing, not the load balancer products themselves.
- urthor 5y ago
  A large part of the actual answer is that they are doing a build in for their first party services like Amazon Prime Video. Those services don't want to be sent intercontinental because it's just an enormous amount of data, and they will incur back-haul charges. Same is true for customer multimedia services. The other reason is data governance/sovereignty use cases. With a bit of ultra high latency on the side.
- startledmarmot 5y ago
  Realtime applications. Anything having to do with video & audio mixing or interaction (WebRTC, VoIP, AR/XR, NLU, Gaming, etc...) Having those as close to the end consumers as possible can dramatically improve the experience and make them far more engaging/enjoyable. In fact, it's critical enough in many applications that clients may want to access the services in the same cloud they use /as well as/ in the same region (or potentially in their own data center.) So that means designing the systems to deploy on any cloud provider. While this does limit the number of niceties you can use from a single provider, it allows for some pretty amazing flexibility.
- bagels 5y ago
  Anything where you want minimal latency, worldwide.
- mooreds 5y ago
  I don't think it is so much compute in every region as it is data storage there. My company stores user data and deploys to most AWS regions. It's a big win for some companies to be able to have their data stay in a given area (esp the EU, but I've also heard Canada mentioned).
amanzi 5y ago
This is big news for us in NZ, and on the back of Microsoft announcing an Azure region here too. Pretty good for a small country to have both AWS and Azure regions right here on our doorstep.
- chi_features 5y ago
  It is great news and I am surprised to be honest. From New Zealand, our closest AWS region is Sydney with a ping (over Wifi, as I write this from Auckland) of 44ms. Our population is ~5M. This only spells great things for the tech prospects in NZ which are already very bright. I, for one, am excited to continue to base tech businesses in this country.
  - herpderperator 5y ago
    RTT to Sydney from Auckland over fibre is about half that at 25ms.
    - Widdershin 5y ago
      Disturbingly enough my ping is 32ms from Wellington to Sydney, and over 40ms to Christchurch, even though Christchurch is ~10x closer.
      - idonotknowwhy 5y ago
        Melbourne to Sydney I'm getting 33ms average. Your 25ms is awesome, you guys did a much better broadband network than us
        lugged 5y ago
        You make this sound like some kind of achievment.
        gregoryl 5y ago
        Who is your provider? I have ~5ms, FTTN, AussieBroadband. Is the latency local WiFi?
spondyl 5y ago
A few interesting NZ tech developments that HNers may not be aware of: * Microsoft announced an Azure datacenter back in May: https://news.microsoft.com/en-nz/2020/05/06/aotearoa-disclosure/ https://news.microsoft.com/en-nz/2020/05/06/aotearoa-disclos... * Larry Page was revealed to be permanent resident of NZ after his child was medievaced from Fiji to Auckland for treatment: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/448544/google-billionaire-met-requirements-to-enter-nz-immigration https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/448544/google-billionair... * Gabe Newell has been here since the initial lockdowns around March 2020 (he was on holiday at the time) and has since applied for residency: https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/nzs-newest-billionaire-covid-stranded-american-gaming-ceo-gabe-newell-applies-nz-residency https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/nzs-newest-billi...
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Isn’t gabe back in the US now?
- timmit 5y ago
  And don't forget. 11 years ago, Kim Dotcom came to New Zealand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Move_to_New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Move_to_New_Zealand
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  I did not know Page was in New Zealand. The article suggests Page is not a resident not a resident. > Immigration NZ said Page is a New Zealand resident. > It said Page does not have permanent residence and his visa will allow him to travel in and out of New Zealand only for a defined period of time.
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    New Zealand has two types of residence that resemble what other countries call permanent residence, one is called Resident, the other Permanent Resident. Resident is like permanent residence in most other countries (e.g. green card in US, PR in Canada, etc). A New Zealand Resident can live in the country indefinitely, but if they live outside of New Zealand for an extended period of time, they lose their Resident status. This is again like US, Australia, Canada, etc. After two years of living in New Zealand as a Resident, one can apply for Permanent Resident status, which does not expire regardless of the length of absence from the country. In other countries, you have to get citizenship before you can do this. In New Zealand, Permanent Resident is a status between Resident and New Zealand Citizen. What the article says is that he is a resident, he can enter New Zealand for now, but his status is of the expirable kind. New Zealand Resident ~ US/Canada/Australia/Germany/etc. Permanent Resident New Zealand Permanent Resident ~ Nothing that I know of, it's unique New Zealand Citizen = US/Canada/Australia/Germany/etc. Citizen
didntknowya 5y ago
The market is not so big here so I would think certain client's security policy about localized data storage would play a role in their decision to build a center here.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kylemuir 5y ago
  I imagine Microsoft announcing a data centre here played a significant role - AWS wouldn't want to be the cloud service with _less_ regions than Microsoft. There are significant AWS customers in New Zealand (Xero jumps to mind) that I imagine Microsoft would love to target with that differentiator of a local data centre.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    But AWS have less regions than Azure: 25+8 under construction for AWS[0] 65(some under construction) for Azure[1] However Azure regions are a single DC, while an AWS region is 3 Availability Zones ( each being at least a single DC), which is much much better for redundancy. Remember that time the whole of Azure's portal and O365 were inaccessible (nobody could log in) because some equipment failed in a single DC in Texas? Design for failure 0 - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ 1 - https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/20/microsoft-azure-announces-its-first-region-in-austria/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/20/microsoft-azure-announces-...
lurker2093 5y ago
great news, there's also apparently a new line being dragged across from Australia that will land in Southland, will be good to get a direct line to Australia that doesn't need to go via the North Island.
- amanzi 5y ago
  I've seen the proposal for the Southland cable, but as far as I'm aware this is not confirmed yet. Unless you know different?
  - lurker2093 5y ago
    ahh, you are right, nothing 100% confirmed yet.... fingers crossed though :)
timmit 5y ago
Pretty funny thing, as a person in a start-up in sourth pacific, we host our products in us-east-1 region, even most of our customers are based in NZ and AUS. We only use sydney region as a testing environment.
- PetahNZ 5y ago
  Same, but I try to at least push for us-west region.
- atlbeer 5y ago
  You don’t explain why but, can we all assume it’s cost?
  - paranoidrobot 5y ago
    Not OP, but that was the reason for various previous employers. Current employer it's all in ap-southeast-2 because of data sovereignty concerns. Getting the Melbourne AWS Region up next year[1] will be good for redundancy. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-melbourne-australia/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-...
  - timmit 5y ago
    One reason is cost. The other i think is the number of services. If I recall correctly, some dns services are in us east only only u host it in other region. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/r53.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/r53.html Name registration is in us east only. DNS resolving is in a few specific regions
- srfvtgb 5y ago
  Due to costs?
noway421 5y ago
As someone living in Auckland, that's amazing news! I've been waiting for this moment for years. I can't wait to be able to deploy applications which respond with sub 30ms latency, using all the nice AWS services. Soon, a lot of New Zealanders will be able to experience much fasters apps and websites which could've been only built on bespoke VPS/dedicated server providers like SiteHost NZ/etc before.
- kortilla 5y ago
  This reads like an ad. It’s like getting excited for an apartment complex. You had the capability to build websites for years before now. Just spend the effort to learn how to administer kubernetes.
  - abraae 5y ago
    What does kubernetes have to do with latency?
  - noway421 5y ago
    As an Aucklander, I would totally be excited for a new apartment complex!
  - Txmm 5y ago
    There are no resources like this that exist in NZ. Bringing server hosting here is super important for data sovereignty and modernising our government tech, and makes it easier for overseas businesses to bring servers here. I’m excited for the possibility of game servers I’ll have less than 80ms to.
ironfootnz 5y ago
Hope they keep the latency less than 20ms, because they're quite bad in Sydney.
jdswain 5y ago
I live in an area of New Zealand surrounded by hydroelectric dam's, and I've often thought it would be a great place for a datacenter. They'd be electricity savings from avoiding the transmission losses to get the electricity all the way to Auckland, and land is cheaper, but mainly because there ought to be a way of using the cold water for cooling rather than electrically powered coolers. The data center could even be built underwater, possibly in a canal to benefit from the existing water flow.
- amanzi 5y ago
  I still like the idea of running a trans-Tasman cable to Southland and building data centres down there when Rio Tinto closes down. Plenty of cheap and green power, and the extra cable would solve the latency issue and provide some extra resiliency for NZ (all international cables currently land in the North Island.)
  - aunty_helen 5y ago
    Rio Tinto aren’t closing the smelter down. They can’t just shoot people like in other countries so they have to be crafty to get what they want. The whole “give us cheap power or we close this plant down” is just a genius power play. People don’t want to be out of jobs and govt want a good excuse to get the deal done. The politicians look like savvy negotiators keeping this massive corporate begging and rio tinto get discount rate power. It’s really a win win ruse for them.
  - robocat 5y ago
    > Plenty of cheap and green power Incorrect. All of the hydropower is used as present, so any extra marginal load added to NZ causes extra gas usage (or coal sometimes). If the lakes are full and water is being sent down spillways, then perhaps you can get free power, but that is rare. Also note that lots of people think transmission losses are heavy, but actually they are less than 10%. For example HVDC transmission losses are ~3% per 1,000km (the DC link from Benmore to Wellington)
- phire 5y ago
  The problem is that the underwater cables land in Auckland, and for most applications, lower latency (both to the local populations and to the rest of the world) is a very important consideration. I did hear that someone is putting in a 10MW cryptocurrecny mining "datacenter" right next to Clyde dam. I'm not exactly happy about that.
daenz 5y ago
I guess the ultra rich need to maintain their cloud access from their doomsday bunkers[0] 0. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...
lubos 5y ago
This is great but I've noticed newer regions do not have feature parity with older ones. For example, me-south-1 and af-south-1 still do not support AWS DataSync fully automated transfers. When this feature has been announced, it was put into 16 regions. Why not all regions where AWS DataSync is available? There is more. This is just last example I've noticed. As a result, when building cross-region service on AWS, it's not enough to just check whether AWS product is available in desired region, you need to check whether every single feature you need within the product is available in desired region too.
- cleverKnight 5y ago
  I work at AWS. Region build is separate process per team and guaranteeing feature parity across all regions is a pretty complex task.
mcoliver 5y ago
Guessing Weta moving to AWS may have something to do with this. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/weta-digital-goes-all-in-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/weta-digital-goes-all-in-...
Taniwha 5y ago
I guess my big question is "will they support F1 instances?" latency to Sydney is a pain
xyzzy123 5y ago
This seems like a fairly direct response to the recent spate of DDoS attacks in NZ. If you cared a lot about data sovereignty you couldn't be in cloud. Many large NZ orgs were "out in the cold". As everyone else in the world moved under the umbrella of "big cloud" they got more and more tempting as targets.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > This seems like a fairly direct response to the recent spate of DDoS attacks in NZ. If so, they got the plan together rather fast.
  - xyzzy123 5y ago
    Yeah you are right it must be a happy accident of timing. The whole "NZ is highly vulnerable to DDoS" thing has been brewing for a while though. I was trying to express that there's a level of non-cloud datacenter use in NZ (for data sov reasons) that would seem anachronistic anywhere else and this is closely related to the prevalence of DDoS attacks targeting the country. I still think it is an interesting dynamic that the effectiveness of big cloud in blunting DDoS pushes risk over to countries with no "in region" facilities.
jiggawatts 5y ago
The Australian city of Perth is further from the current Sydney and Melbourne regions for AWS and Azure than New Zealand is! Sydney-to-Perth is 3,300 km. Sydney-to-Auckland is 2,150 km. Just as how our Kiwi friends are annoyed by high latencies to content served from Australia's east coast, the Aussies in Perth have it even worse. Not to mention that the fibre doesn't go as the crow flies to Perth. The actual undersea cable length is more like 4,600 km, which is more than double the relatively direct path the fibre takes to Auckland... All of this pales in comparison to central Africa and all of the former-USSR states, where neither AWS nor Azure have any regions: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio...
- exidy 5y ago
  Content delivery is the province of CDNs, and AWS has a CloudFront POP in Perth[1]. Putting a region into NZ is all about data sovereignty and BS11. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/ https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/
- someperson 5y ago
  For what it's worth the new "GeForce Now" cloud gaming platform beta will is based in Perth (using the hardware of the local Pentanet internet service provider). If the beta is a success, I'm sure it will be hosted locally in most capital cities eventually.
aaron695 5y ago
New Zealand is 5 million people. There are 80 cities bigger than that - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities I wonder what the business case is?
- Mandatum 5y ago
  M$FT/Azure is getting govt money cause they have on-shore DC's. AWS is very likely going after a long-term FVEYs agreement.
- lugged 5y ago
  Same as it is for all the other regions? Supply < demand. Why is this even a question?
  - aaron695 5y ago
    Lol, 100% HN. Nothing has a cost. Not sure if that's the magic of HN Socialism or the fact HN can't do numbers (or is that the same thing?) Any wonder the cost of the managerial complexity of going from 25 AWS Regions to 26 can't be discussed. How did this happen to IT? It used to be about smart nerds.
terrywang 5y ago
It seems to be good news for Kiwi expats who wants to go home. Income may shrink (in comparison with US) but quality of life improvement may be significant. However, for those who do not own a residence in Auckland (suffering from even worse housing unaffordability issue than Sydney) may need to move outside of Auckland metro area to get more significant QoL gain. NOTE: A colleague of mine moved back to Wellington (his home town) from Bay Area at the beginning of 2020. I have done a few Zoom / Facetime catch up with him since, he seems happy, energetic and refreshed (positive), stark contrast to the him back in 2018-2019 (SF / Bay Area). Looking forward to visit NZ once the travel bubble reopens.
chrisjc 5y ago
Apart from providing first party service like Prime Video, and second party services like Netflix, Disney, etc... (and apart from data governance/sovereignty reasons) might there be any specific industries that they targeting specific to NZ? Weta comes to mind, but I can only imagine they're a drop in the bucket.
- aeyes 5y ago
  Their Cloudfront CDN has been present in New Zealand since late last year. It's not just customers in NZ profiting from this, you will now have a disaster recovery region for Australia.
- wseagar 5y ago
  NZ resident here and in the tech scene. Here's some speculation: What I've heard is that the AUS data centres for Azure and AWS have been getting hammered and have been non stop adding servers/capacity. So from perspective it does make sense to move some of that load off to NZ. Microsoft announced their NZ data centre first, then because of data sovereignty issues you mentioned stands to gain all that business from govt and AWS is now trying to play catchup. Another big driver is banks, it is a data governance/sovereignty issue but its a little bit more nuanced than at first glance. In NZ almost all of our largest banks are Australian owned and are running multi-tenanted systems in AU data centres and are heavily invested in cloud. Our reserve bank has recently made this policy called BS11 requiring banks to bring all there IT systems onshore. https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bs11-impacts-and-its-it-implications https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bs11-impacts-and-its-it-implic... So I suspect both Microsoft and AWS have picked up huge contracts with banks which are subsidising these data centres to save the NZ banks from rewriting a ton of their systems not to use AWS/Azure.
  - chrisjc 5y ago
    Perhaps I just don't understand the scale involved in banking, but I can't imagine that would be enough or even a substantial part of the driving force. I would think that a new region in AUS an or expansion of the current AUS one would have been a more prudent choice. Don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic that NZ has 2/3 of the cloud providers setting up shop. NZ and NZ-ers often times punch way above their weight and I imagine this decision will only lower the barrier for many of those resourceful entrepreneurs. This combined with fiber rollout and starlink availability is really going to do wonders for NZ. Whatever the reason, it's exciting.

184 points by jeffbarr 5y ago

I'm amazed by how much the list of regions has gotten over the years. Most companies I've worked for have only used at most 2 regions for EC2, more for S3. Aside from Cloudfront, are there use cases you've seen for having compute in every region?

itisit 5y ago
A lot of businesses like to have their cloud ops located in and subject to the laws of the country said businesses are based in.
- dangerboysteve 5y ago
  governments as well.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    Yes many hosting companies in NZ rely on that. It's going to be hard for them to keep their niche.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
ctvo 5y ago
Depends on your architecture. You're still restricted by physics with edge computing. If you need to make a call back into us-east-1 to get data out of a data store, it doesn't matter that there's an edge CDN and API layer. Outside of that, there's compliance reasons too. Partitioning your data by region because storing customer information in say the EU is different than the US. More likely CN is much different than the rest of the world if you do business there.
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  It does in fact matter that your tcp packets are roundtripping over lower rtt connection even if you do have to fetch from the origin
mrkurt 5y ago
There are many use cases for compute in every (or at least, 3+) regions. But it's very difficult to manage. So difficult that most things that would benefit can't afford the complexity.
jamesfinlayson 5y ago
Redundancy, but I don't know how easy AWS makes it to run say, a container, in two different regions. I think their load balancers can balance between regions but I'm not sure how well other services can do it.
- byoung2 5y ago
  What comes to mind is DNS based load balancing. You'd have a full stack running in each region, and users get routed to the one nearest them. I could see this working for something like Dropbox or an email service where users can be easily segmented.
  - dilyevsky 5y ago
    You can do that or you can use their Global Accelerator thingy that gives you an anycast IP but technically they dont have an lb that spans regions (nor would you probably want one)
    - jamesfinlayson 5y ago
      Yeah I think I was thinking of the Route 53 based region load balancing, not the load balancer products themselves.
urthor 5y ago
A large part of the actual answer is that they are doing a build in for their first party services like Amazon Prime Video. Those services don't want to be sent intercontinental because it's just an enormous amount of data, and they will incur back-haul charges. Same is true for customer multimedia services. The other reason is data governance/sovereignty use cases. With a bit of ultra high latency on the side.
startledmarmot 5y ago
Realtime applications. Anything having to do with video & audio mixing or interaction (WebRTC, VoIP, AR/XR, NLU, Gaming, etc...) Having those as close to the end consumers as possible can dramatically improve the experience and make them far more engaging/enjoyable. In fact, it's critical enough in many applications that clients may want to access the services in the same cloud they use /as well as/ in the same region (or potentially in their own data center.) So that means designing the systems to deploy on any cloud provider. While this does limit the number of niceties you can use from a single provider, it allows for some pretty amazing flexibility.
bagels 5y ago
Anything where you want minimal latency, worldwide.
mooreds 5y ago
I don't think it is so much compute in every region as it is data storage there. My company stores user data and deploys to most AWS regions. It's a big win for some companies to be able to have their data stay in a given area (esp the EU, but I've also heard Canada mentioned).

amanzi 5y ago

This is big news for us in NZ, and on the back of Microsoft announcing an Azure region here too. Pretty good for a small country to have both AWS and Azure regions right here on our doorstep.

chi_features 5y ago
It is great news and I am surprised to be honest. From New Zealand, our closest AWS region is Sydney with a ping (over Wifi, as I write this from Auckland) of 44ms. Our population is ~5M. This only spells great things for the tech prospects in NZ which are already very bright. I, for one, am excited to continue to base tech businesses in this country.
- herpderperator 5y ago
  RTT to Sydney from Auckland over fibre is about half that at 25ms.
  - Widdershin 5y ago
    Disturbingly enough my ping is 32ms from Wellington to Sydney, and over 40ms to Christchurch, even though Christchurch is ~10x closer.
    - idonotknowwhy 5y ago
      Melbourne to Sydney I'm getting 33ms average. Your 25ms is awesome, you guys did a much better broadband network than us
      - lugged 5y ago
        You make this sound like some kind of achievment.
      - gregoryl 5y ago
        Who is your provider? I have ~5ms, FTTN, AussieBroadband. Is the latency local WiFi?

spondyl 5y ago

A few interesting NZ tech developments that HNers may not be aware of: * Microsoft announced an Azure datacenter back in May: https://news.microsoft.com/en-nz/2020/05/06/aotearoa-disclosure/ https://news.microsoft.com/en-nz/2020/05/06/aotearoa-disclos... * Larry Page was revealed to be permanent resident of NZ after his child was medievaced from Fiji to Auckland for treatment: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/448544/google-billionaire-met-requirements-to-enter-nz-immigration https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/448544/google-billionair... * Gabe Newell has been here since the initial lockdowns around March 2020 (he was on holiday at the time) and has since applied for residency: https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/nzs-newest-billionaire-covid-stranded-american-gaming-ceo-gabe-newell-applies-nz-residency https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/nzs-newest-billi...

philliphaydon 5y ago
Isn’t gabe back in the US now?
timmit 5y ago
And don't forget. 11 years ago, Kim Dotcom came to New Zealand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Move_to_New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Move_to_New_Zealand
nuclearnice1 5y ago
I did not know Page was in New Zealand. The article suggests Page is not a resident not a resident. > Immigration NZ said Page is a New Zealand resident. > It said Page does not have permanent residence and his visa will allow him to travel in and out of New Zealand only for a defined period of time.
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  New Zealand has two types of residence that resemble what other countries call permanent residence, one is called Resident, the other Permanent Resident. Resident is like permanent residence in most other countries (e.g. green card in US, PR in Canada, etc). A New Zealand Resident can live in the country indefinitely, but if they live outside of New Zealand for an extended period of time, they lose their Resident status. This is again like US, Australia, Canada, etc. After two years of living in New Zealand as a Resident, one can apply for Permanent Resident status, which does not expire regardless of the length of absence from the country. In other countries, you have to get citizenship before you can do this. In New Zealand, Permanent Resident is a status between Resident and New Zealand Citizen. What the article says is that he is a resident, he can enter New Zealand for now, but his status is of the expirable kind. New Zealand Resident ~ US/Canada/Australia/Germany/etc. Permanent Resident New Zealand Permanent Resident ~ Nothing that I know of, it's unique New Zealand Citizen = US/Canada/Australia/Germany/etc. Citizen

didntknowya 5y ago

The market is not so big here so I would think certain client's security policy about localized data storage would play a role in their decision to build a center here.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kylemuir 5y ago
I imagine Microsoft announcing a data centre here played a significant role - AWS wouldn't want to be the cloud service with _less_ regions than Microsoft. There are significant AWS customers in New Zealand (Xero jumps to mind) that I imagine Microsoft would love to target with that differentiator of a local data centre.
- sofixa 5y ago
  But AWS have less regions than Azure: 25+8 under construction for AWS[0] 65(some under construction) for Azure[1] However Azure regions are a single DC, while an AWS region is 3 Availability Zones ( each being at least a single DC), which is much much better for redundancy. Remember that time the whole of Azure's portal and O365 were inaccessible (nobody could log in) because some equipment failed in a single DC in Texas? Design for failure 0 - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ 1 - https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/20/microsoft-azure-announces-its-first-region-in-austria/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/20/microsoft-azure-announces-...

lurker2093 5y ago

great news, there's also apparently a new line being dragged across from Australia that will land in Southland, will be good to get a direct line to Australia that doesn't need to go via the North Island.

amanzi 5y ago
I've seen the proposal for the Southland cable, but as far as I'm aware this is not confirmed yet. Unless you know different?
- lurker2093 5y ago
  ahh, you are right, nothing 100% confirmed yet.... fingers crossed though :)

timmit 5y ago

Pretty funny thing, as a person in a start-up in sourth pacific, we host our products in us-east-1 region, even most of our customers are based in NZ and AUS. We only use sydney region as a testing environment.

PetahNZ 5y ago
Same, but I try to at least push for us-west region.
atlbeer 5y ago
You don’t explain why but, can we all assume it’s cost?
- paranoidrobot 5y ago
  Not OP, but that was the reason for various previous employers. Current employer it's all in ap-southeast-2 because of data sovereignty concerns. Getting the Melbourne AWS Region up next year[1] will be good for redundancy. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-melbourne-australia/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-...
- timmit 5y ago
  One reason is cost. The other i think is the number of services. If I recall correctly, some dns services are in us east only only u host it in other region. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/r53.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/r53.html Name registration is in us east only. DNS resolving is in a few specific regions
srfvtgb 5y ago
Due to costs?

noway421 5y ago

As someone living in Auckland, that's amazing news! I've been waiting for this moment for years. I can't wait to be able to deploy applications which respond with sub 30ms latency, using all the nice AWS services. Soon, a lot of New Zealanders will be able to experience much fasters apps and websites which could've been only built on bespoke VPS/dedicated server providers like SiteHost NZ/etc before.

kortilla 5y ago
This reads like an ad. It’s like getting excited for an apartment complex. You had the capability to build websites for years before now. Just spend the effort to learn how to administer kubernetes.
- abraae 5y ago
  What does kubernetes have to do with latency?
- noway421 5y ago
  As an Aucklander, I would totally be excited for a new apartment complex!
- Txmm 5y ago
  There are no resources like this that exist in NZ. Bringing server hosting here is super important for data sovereignty and modernising our government tech, and makes it easier for overseas businesses to bring servers here. I’m excited for the possibility of game servers I’ll have less than 80ms to.

ironfootnz 5y ago

Hope they keep the latency less than 20ms, because they're quite bad in Sydney.

jdswain 5y ago

I live in an area of New Zealand surrounded by hydroelectric dam's, and I've often thought it would be a great place for a datacenter. They'd be electricity savings from avoiding the transmission losses to get the electricity all the way to Auckland, and land is cheaper, but mainly because there ought to be a way of using the cold water for cooling rather than electrically powered coolers. The data center could even be built underwater, possibly in a canal to benefit from the existing water flow.

amanzi 5y ago
I still like the idea of running a trans-Tasman cable to Southland and building data centres down there when Rio Tinto closes down. Plenty of cheap and green power, and the extra cable would solve the latency issue and provide some extra resiliency for NZ (all international cables currently land in the North Island.)
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  Rio Tinto aren’t closing the smelter down. They can’t just shoot people like in other countries so they have to be crafty to get what they want. The whole “give us cheap power or we close this plant down” is just a genius power play. People don’t want to be out of jobs and govt want a good excuse to get the deal done. The politicians look like savvy negotiators keeping this massive corporate begging and rio tinto get discount rate power. It’s really a win win ruse for them.
- robocat 5y ago
  > Plenty of cheap and green power Incorrect. All of the hydropower is used as present, so any extra marginal load added to NZ causes extra gas usage (or coal sometimes). If the lakes are full and water is being sent down spillways, then perhaps you can get free power, but that is rare. Also note that lots of people think transmission losses are heavy, but actually they are less than 10%. For example HVDC transmission losses are ~3% per 1,000km (the DC link from Benmore to Wellington)
phire 5y ago
The problem is that the underwater cables land in Auckland, and for most applications, lower latency (both to the local populations and to the rest of the world) is a very important consideration. I did hear that someone is putting in a 10MW cryptocurrecny mining "datacenter" right next to Clyde dam. I'm not exactly happy about that.

daenz 5y ago

I guess the ultra rich need to maintain their cloud access from their doomsday bunkers[0] 0. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...

lubos 5y ago

This is great but I've noticed newer regions do not have feature parity with older ones. For example, me-south-1 and af-south-1 still do not support AWS DataSync fully automated transfers. When this feature has been announced, it was put into 16 regions. Why not all regions where AWS DataSync is available? There is more. This is just last example I've noticed. As a result, when building cross-region service on AWS, it's not enough to just check whether AWS product is available in desired region, you need to check whether every single feature you need within the product is available in desired region too.

cleverKnight 5y ago
I work at AWS. Region build is separate process per team and guaranteeing feature parity across all regions is a pretty complex task.

mcoliver 5y ago

Guessing Weta moving to AWS may have something to do with this. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/weta-digital-goes-all-in-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/weta-digital-goes-all-in-...

Taniwha 5y ago

I guess my big question is "will they support F1 instances?" latency to Sydney is a pain

xyzzy123 5y ago

This seems like a fairly direct response to the recent spate of DDoS attacks in NZ. If you cared a lot about data sovereignty you couldn't be in cloud. Many large NZ orgs were "out in the cold". As everyone else in the world moved under the umbrella of "big cloud" they got more and more tempting as targets.

lostlogin 5y ago
> This seems like a fairly direct response to the recent spate of DDoS attacks in NZ. If so, they got the plan together rather fast.
- xyzzy123 5y ago
  Yeah you are right it must be a happy accident of timing. The whole "NZ is highly vulnerable to DDoS" thing has been brewing for a while though. I was trying to express that there's a level of non-cloud datacenter use in NZ (for data sov reasons) that would seem anachronistic anywhere else and this is closely related to the prevalence of DDoS attacks targeting the country. I still think it is an interesting dynamic that the effectiveness of big cloud in blunting DDoS pushes risk over to countries with no "in region" facilities.

jiggawatts 5y ago

The Australian city of Perth is further from the current Sydney and Melbourne regions for AWS and Azure than New Zealand is! Sydney-to-Perth is 3,300 km. Sydney-to-Auckland is 2,150 km. Just as how our Kiwi friends are annoyed by high latencies to content served from Australia's east coast, the Aussies in Perth have it even worse. Not to mention that the fibre doesn't go as the crow flies to Perth. The actual undersea cable length is more like 4,600 km, which is more than double the relatively direct path the fibre takes to Auckland... All of this pales in comparison to central Africa and all of the former-USSR states, where neither AWS nor Azure have any regions: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio...

exidy 5y ago
Content delivery is the province of CDNs, and AWS has a CloudFront POP in Perth[1]. Putting a region into NZ is all about data sovereignty and BS11. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/ https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/
someperson 5y ago
For what it's worth the new "GeForce Now" cloud gaming platform beta will is based in Perth (using the hardware of the local Pentanet internet service provider). If the beta is a success, I'm sure it will be hosted locally in most capital cities eventually.

aaron695 5y ago

New Zealand is 5 million people. There are 80 cities bigger than that - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities I wonder what the business case is?

Mandatum 5y ago
M$FT/Azure is getting govt money cause they have on-shore DC's. AWS is very likely going after a long-term FVEYs agreement.
lugged 5y ago
Same as it is for all the other regions? Supply < demand. Why is this even a question?
- aaron695 5y ago
  Lol, 100% HN. Nothing has a cost. Not sure if that's the magic of HN Socialism or the fact HN can't do numbers (or is that the same thing?) Any wonder the cost of the managerial complexity of going from 25 AWS Regions to 26 can't be discussed. How did this happen to IT? It used to be about smart nerds.

terrywang 5y ago

It seems to be good news for Kiwi expats who wants to go home. Income may shrink (in comparison with US) but quality of life improvement may be significant. However, for those who do not own a residence in Auckland (suffering from even worse housing unaffordability issue than Sydney) may need to move outside of Auckland metro area to get more significant QoL gain. NOTE: A colleague of mine moved back to Wellington (his home town) from Bay Area at the beginning of 2020. I have done a few Zoom / Facetime catch up with him since, he seems happy, energetic and refreshed (positive), stark contrast to the him back in 2018-2019 (SF / Bay Area). Looking forward to visit NZ once the travel bubble reopens.

chrisjc 5y ago

Apart from providing first party service like Prime Video, and second party services like Netflix, Disney, etc... (and apart from data governance/sovereignty reasons) might there be any specific industries that they targeting specific to NZ? Weta comes to mind, but I can only imagine they're a drop in the bucket.

aeyes 5y ago
Their Cloudfront CDN has been present in New Zealand since late last year. It's not just customers in NZ profiting from this, you will now have a disaster recovery region for Australia.
wseagar 5y ago
NZ resident here and in the tech scene. Here's some speculation: What I've heard is that the AUS data centres for Azure and AWS have been getting hammered and have been non stop adding servers/capacity. So from perspective it does make sense to move some of that load off to NZ. Microsoft announced their NZ data centre first, then because of data sovereignty issues you mentioned stands to gain all that business from govt and AWS is now trying to play catchup. Another big driver is banks, it is a data governance/sovereignty issue but its a little bit more nuanced than at first glance. In NZ almost all of our largest banks are Australian owned and are running multi-tenanted systems in AU data centres and are heavily invested in cloud. Our reserve bank has recently made this policy called BS11 requiring banks to bring all there IT systems onshore. https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bs11-impacts-and-its-it-implications https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bs11-impacts-and-its-it-implic... So I suspect both Microsoft and AWS have picked up huge contracts with banks which are subsidising these data centres to save the NZ banks from rewriting a ton of their systems not to use AWS/Azure.
- chrisjc 5y ago
  Perhaps I just don't understand the scale involved in banking, but I can't imagine that would be enough or even a substantial part of the driving force. I would think that a new region in AUS an or expansion of the current AUS one would have been a more prudent choice. Don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic that NZ has 2/3 of the cloud providers setting up shop. NZ and NZ-ers often times punch way above their weight and I imagine this decision will only lower the barrier for many of those resourceful entrepreneurs. This combined with fiber rollout and starlink availability is really going to do wonders for NZ. Whatever the reason, it's exciting.