5 ms·

New AWS region coming soon: eu-central-1

83 points by nilsjuenemann 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rmoriz 12y ago
Hopefully this will drive many DE ISPs out of business. Strato, 1&1 and Hetzner are incapable of providing anything besides dumb webhosting and cheap bare metal stuff. I've wasted so many hours trying to explain these companies how the world is changing, they never got it and now it's too late to build anything that could compete with AWS. They (1&1, Strato, HostEurope, Hetzner, …) don't even try to provide OpenStack packages or something leightweight-ish using Docker, except if you pay every single hour of their manual work. 1&1 build something called ProfitBricks.de which focusses of "designing your infrastructure in the browser", however they build a big Java EE legacy framework with a nasty SOAP-API. Their sales pitch is something like "we are cheaper than amazon/they rip of their customers". And still they neither contributed support to LibCloud or fog.io so neither Chef, Puppet, Ansible nor SaltStack work out of the box with it. I don't understand those people.
- lucian1900 12y ago
  Hetzner can give you extremely cheap physical hardware, prices which you cannot hope to approach with AWS. You don't need any of the buzzword-y technologies you list to be supported directly by the host. If you want Docker, you can run it yourself. VMs are over-rated.
  - rmoriz 12y ago
    If you want to build something sustainable, you earn money or need to be able to scale incredibly well. If you just want to host your private blog, even DigitalOcean provides better packages than Hetzner.
  - seanp2k2 12y ago
    I don't have a horse in this race, but IMO the point is more about AWS-provided infrastructure that lets people scale more easily than otherwise possible; things like Elastic Map Reduce, S3, DynamoDB, SQS + SNS, RDS, etc are less-easily replaced by home-grown equivalents. There are great open-source solutions for every one of those things, but the point is having to not manage them. If you're using the cloud as "just another data center", I feel like you're missing many of the benefits of software-defined infrastructure and disposable systems.
    - rmoriz 12y ago
      exactly. Speed of innovation is how you win. If you start with an MVP, a cheap 5$ droplet at digital ocean is cheaper than the cheapest hetzner server. if you grow and need failover-solutions, you'll run into a lot of devops work when you build everything your own. (you can't automate a lot of work because of lack of API and automation by the typical providers) So it's not a price question imho. It's about speed of innovation, usability of "building blocks" and limiting of operational risks.
    - lucian1900 12y ago
      Tying yourself to a specific provider is dangerous. RDS and EMR are fine, since you can reproduce the exact same API anywhere else. S3 is also fine, since its API is simple enough and even reproduced by other vendors. Something like DynamoDB I wouldn't touch. Things like AWS are great for when you don't yet know what you need, for absorbing load peaks and for getting something running very quickly. They are however the most expensive thing you can buy for what you get.
- MartinMond 12y ago
  I hope Hetzner will be able to compete, because their offers have so much better performance per EUR than Amazon's: https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-px https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-p... I talked to some colleagues about scaling with Hetzner and their answer was to just overprovision like crazy since Hetzner's so cheap anyhow.
  - rmoriz 12y ago
    how? You don't have a shared storage nor a private network nor "availability zones". Sure, you can tinker something if you have free time but you'll move off and regret it. Like Wooga and others. If you run some cluster FS on your single, external network interface, it's quite easy to DoS your cluster. There is no option to place a service inside a DC, you can ask them but this will result in a manual provision taking days —or be ignored. Also you don't know how the different DCs are connected in terms of internal bandwidth and external reliability. Hetzner itself says their inter-dc connections "are not optimized", whatever that means. If you run multiple customers on your system and one get's DoSed, Hetzner will disconnect your system. Sure, this was good enough 2-3 years ago, but they didn't change their DoS, provisioning and networking setup.
    - oddx 12y ago
      You don't need anything that you mention to scale. My company using hetzner for many years to build profitable business (not extremely big, but not "private blog") and we are happy with our choice. It probably took a slightly more time to build scalable solution with hetzner, but our monthly bill is 9 times smaller with hetzner (than comparable hardware with AWS). This savings allow us to hire 2-3 people more that easily covers additional work.
      - rmoriz 12y ago
        How do you define scaling if a manual process controlled by another party is involved? Besides that, what do you think that Hetzner does not provide a 2 factor authentication? As Hetzner doesn't use HSTS on their client/api interface, it's quite easy to run ssl downgrade attacks, sniff your credentials and format all your servers, delete all your backups.
- jdong 12y ago
  How would they go around selling something like docker? Selling servers with docker preinstalled? Why can't you install it yourself?
  - rmoriz 12y ago
    Because provisioning is slow, especially for additional IPv4 networks. They could provide a PaaS-Services like e.g. https://stackdock.com/ https://stackdock.com/ utilizing Docker. Or at least some virtual private-networking and iSCSI-block storage and object storage (like S3). Honestly their cheap-server-design could be a great foundation for something, if they federate it and provide it. It's nearly unmanagble to do it yourself as you don't have a privat interconnect, availability/redundancy (e.g. in which DC the put a system) and you can only have one failover IP/network per system. Also they have really bad luck with hard drives. I've had SMART errors/disk replacement in 3 or 4 disks on a single machine over the past 2 years.
    - jdong 12y ago
      Renting out docker containers on a server shared by multiple customers is a completely ridiculous idea from a security point of view though.
- Wilya 12y ago
  Dude, chill out. I don't see how the fact that these providers don't target your specific needs imply that they need to be driven out of business. I use both AWS and Hetzner. Both have very different offerings aimed at different use cases. AWS gives you simplicity, but everything is crazy expensive. Hetzner and friends give you much more powerful hardware, but you have to setup things yourself.
  - rmoriz 12y ago
    I have to setup things myself on AWS, too, but I can use standard tools like Chef or Puppet and don't have to deal with manual service requests or running a mash-VPN myself to connect my physical machines over a single network just to have some "private" networking. I think DigitalOcean is a nice example of how fast you iterate. They did many things right, some wrong. But the don't settle. They are building new things like private networking, their v2 api, IPv6 (hetzner doesn't provide v6 on vservers iirc EDIT: they do now). The default answer I got when asking for features that e.g. US, UK or FR based ISPs already have is: "But it's not hosted in Germany! The cloud is insecure!" Today we know, that it doesn't matter, where in Europe you're located as intelligence services cooperate and share all data. So Hetzner for example is required to provide access to german intelligence services by law. They share it with the NSA. So it's FUD. So maybe this provides some insight of my kind of emotional initial posting.
    - justincormack 12y ago
      Hetzner does provide ipv6 on VPS. You just request it in the control panel and get a /64 allocated.
jann 12y ago
I'm excited about the pricing, hopefully it's not more expensive than Ireland... Maybe even cheaper, although I won't get my hopes up with electricity prices in Germany being so high.
sunsu 12y ago
Thought it said "us-central" at first. Was hoping for a Dallas datacenter!
funkyy 12y ago
I am happy that this is called central. I would like to see more recognition to Central Europe in geo-political world as current line between west and east Europe do not make much more sense anymore. Central europe culture and economy ties makes it strong candidate to new order - West Europe Central Europe and East Europe. I am thrilled to see what Amazon will have to offer!
cowbell 12y ago
I'll wait to see how this pans out first, thanks... http://phys.org/news/2014-06-microsoft-court-overseas.html http://phys.org/news/2014-06-microsoft-court-overseas.html
- us0r 12y ago
  Have you been reading the rest of the news over the last year or so? If they want it, they are taking it. That is of course unless governments aren't already sharing. I had a potential client from the Netherlands (pre-NSA) say no thanks as we are a US based company and he didn't want the possibility of the US government obtaining his data. Fair enough I wasn't going to change his mind. Those who travel frequently internationally know (or should) about a program called Global Entry. Basically let's you go though the border using a machine instead of talking to an immigration officer. At the time it was available to US citizens (with a squeaky clean record) and Dutch citizens. What kind of information sharing must the Dutch be doing with the US to allow us to basically open our borders? Back to data centers and pretending governments aren't in bed with the NSA for some reason or another and a non US company owns the data center. Who do you think is providing the pipe going into that data center? Almost certainly a US company (or it is 1-2 hops away).
- molf 12y ago
  How would this be different in Ireland (eu-west-1)?
dmourati 12y ago
Note, a region is not a data center. A region is a collection of two or more Availability Zones (AZ). You can think of an AZ as a data center. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/images/aws_regions.png http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/images/aw...
- thirsteh 12y ago
  But even an AZ is not necessarily one physical data center; it may be many.
  - dmourati 12y ago
    Agree, but it is somewhat unclear.
- vacri 12y ago
  There's always at least three - there's a 'hidden' datacentre in each region if you can only see two AZs.
  - tiernano 12y ago
    for example eu-west-1: AWS bought that big warehouse in Tallaght, and it is somewhat operational, but not "live". You cant select it.
jafingi 12y ago
Awesome! But would still love to have a location in Amsterdam directly on the AMS-IX.
- iamtew 12y ago
  Luckily most locations in Amsterdam worth their salt is connected to AMS-IX, https://ams-ix.net/connect-to-ams-ix/colocations https://ams-ix.net/connect-to-ams-ix/colocations If AWS setup deployment in Amsterdam, I can't imagine it wouldn't be in one of those places.
tellnes 12y ago
It looks like they have removed most of the DNS records, but eu-central-1.amazonaws.com still gives an authorative answer.
ThePhysicist 12y ago
Honestly this is great news! As the article says, many German companies insist on their data being hosted in a data center in Germany when buying SaaS (for whatever reason). So far, there haven't been any viable options when it comes to "full-stack" IaaS service providers here (except Profitbricks maybe, which doesn't even come close to AWS in terms of functionality or pricing though), so I'm really excited to see Amazon entering this market. Of course the problem remains that Amazon is a US company and thereby required to cooperate with US authorities and hand them over customer data if requested, so some businesses might still not want to host their data there. Still, I'm excited that they're finally coming to Germany !

83 points by nilsjuenemann 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Hopefully this will drive many DE ISPs out of business. Strato, 1&1 and Hetzner are incapable of providing anything besides dumb webhosting and cheap bare metal stuff. I've wasted so many hours trying to explain these companies how the world is changing, they never got it and now it's too late to build anything that could compete with AWS. They (1&1, Strato, HostEurope, Hetzner, …) don't even try to provide OpenStack packages or something leightweight-ish using Docker, except if you pay every single hour of their manual work. 1&1 build something called ProfitBricks.de which focusses of "designing your infrastructure in the browser", however they build a big Java EE legacy framework with a nasty SOAP-API. Their sales pitch is something like "we are cheaper than amazon/they rip of their customers". And still they neither contributed support to LibCloud or fog.io so neither Chef, Puppet, Ansible nor SaltStack work out of the box with it. I don't understand those people.

lucian1900 12y ago
Hetzner can give you extremely cheap physical hardware, prices which you cannot hope to approach with AWS. You don't need any of the buzzword-y technologies you list to be supported directly by the host. If you want Docker, you can run it yourself. VMs are over-rated.
- rmoriz 12y ago
  If you want to build something sustainable, you earn money or need to be able to scale incredibly well. If you just want to host your private blog, even DigitalOcean provides better packages than Hetzner.
- seanp2k2 12y ago
  I don't have a horse in this race, but IMO the point is more about AWS-provided infrastructure that lets people scale more easily than otherwise possible; things like Elastic Map Reduce, S3, DynamoDB, SQS + SNS, RDS, etc are less-easily replaced by home-grown equivalents. There are great open-source solutions for every one of those things, but the point is having to not manage them. If you're using the cloud as "just another data center", I feel like you're missing many of the benefits of software-defined infrastructure and disposable systems.
  - rmoriz 12y ago
    exactly. Speed of innovation is how you win. If you start with an MVP, a cheap 5$ droplet at digital ocean is cheaper than the cheapest hetzner server. if you grow and need failover-solutions, you'll run into a lot of devops work when you build everything your own. (you can't automate a lot of work because of lack of API and automation by the typical providers) So it's not a price question imho. It's about speed of innovation, usability of "building blocks" and limiting of operational risks.
  - lucian1900 12y ago
    Tying yourself to a specific provider is dangerous. RDS and EMR are fine, since you can reproduce the exact same API anywhere else. S3 is also fine, since its API is simple enough and even reproduced by other vendors. Something like DynamoDB I wouldn't touch. Things like AWS are great for when you don't yet know what you need, for absorbing load peaks and for getting something running very quickly. They are however the most expensive thing you can buy for what you get.
MartinMond 12y ago
I hope Hetzner will be able to compete, because their offers have so much better performance per EUR than Amazon's: https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-px https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-p... I talked to some colleagues about scaling with Hetzner and their answer was to just overprovision like crazy since Hetzner's so cheap anyhow.
- rmoriz 12y ago
  how? You don't have a shared storage nor a private network nor "availability zones". Sure, you can tinker something if you have free time but you'll move off and regret it. Like Wooga and others. If you run some cluster FS on your single, external network interface, it's quite easy to DoS your cluster. There is no option to place a service inside a DC, you can ask them but this will result in a manual provision taking days —or be ignored. Also you don't know how the different DCs are connected in terms of internal bandwidth and external reliability. Hetzner itself says their inter-dc connections "are not optimized", whatever that means. If you run multiple customers on your system and one get's DoSed, Hetzner will disconnect your system. Sure, this was good enough 2-3 years ago, but they didn't change their DoS, provisioning and networking setup.
  - oddx 12y ago
    You don't need anything that you mention to scale. My company using hetzner for many years to build profitable business (not extremely big, but not "private blog") and we are happy with our choice. It probably took a slightly more time to build scalable solution with hetzner, but our monthly bill is 9 times smaller with hetzner (than comparable hardware with AWS). This savings allow us to hire 2-3 people more that easily covers additional work.
    - rmoriz 12y ago
      How do you define scaling if a manual process controlled by another party is involved? Besides that, what do you think that Hetzner does not provide a 2 factor authentication? As Hetzner doesn't use HSTS on their client/api interface, it's quite easy to run ssl downgrade attacks, sniff your credentials and format all your servers, delete all your backups.
jdong 12y ago
How would they go around selling something like docker? Selling servers with docker preinstalled? Why can't you install it yourself?
- rmoriz 12y ago
  Because provisioning is slow, especially for additional IPv4 networks. They could provide a PaaS-Services like e.g. https://stackdock.com/ https://stackdock.com/ utilizing Docker. Or at least some virtual private-networking and iSCSI-block storage and object storage (like S3). Honestly their cheap-server-design could be a great foundation for something, if they federate it and provide it. It's nearly unmanagble to do it yourself as you don't have a privat interconnect, availability/redundancy (e.g. in which DC the put a system) and you can only have one failover IP/network per system. Also they have really bad luck with hard drives. I've had SMART errors/disk replacement in 3 or 4 disks on a single machine over the past 2 years.
  - jdong 12y ago
    Renting out docker containers on a server shared by multiple customers is a completely ridiculous idea from a security point of view though.
Wilya 12y ago
Dude, chill out. I don't see how the fact that these providers don't target your specific needs imply that they need to be driven out of business. I use both AWS and Hetzner. Both have very different offerings aimed at different use cases. AWS gives you simplicity, but everything is crazy expensive. Hetzner and friends give you much more powerful hardware, but you have to setup things yourself.
- rmoriz 12y ago
  I have to setup things myself on AWS, too, but I can use standard tools like Chef or Puppet and don't have to deal with manual service requests or running a mash-VPN myself to connect my physical machines over a single network just to have some "private" networking. I think DigitalOcean is a nice example of how fast you iterate. They did many things right, some wrong. But the don't settle. They are building new things like private networking, their v2 api, IPv6 (hetzner doesn't provide v6 on vservers iirc EDIT: they do now). The default answer I got when asking for features that e.g. US, UK or FR based ISPs already have is: "But it's not hosted in Germany! The cloud is insecure!" Today we know, that it doesn't matter, where in Europe you're located as intelligence services cooperate and share all data. So Hetzner for example is required to provide access to german intelligence services by law. They share it with the NSA. So it's FUD. So maybe this provides some insight of my kind of emotional initial posting.
  - justincormack 12y ago
    Hetzner does provide ipv6 on VPS. You just request it in the control panel and get a /64 allocated.

jann 12y ago

I'm excited about the pricing, hopefully it's not more expensive than Ireland... Maybe even cheaper, although I won't get my hopes up with electricity prices in Germany being so high.

sunsu 12y ago

Thought it said "us-central" at first. Was hoping for a Dallas datacenter!

funkyy 12y ago

I am happy that this is called central. I would like to see more recognition to Central Europe in geo-political world as current line between west and east Europe do not make much more sense anymore. Central europe culture and economy ties makes it strong candidate to new order - West Europe Central Europe and East Europe. I am thrilled to see what Amazon will have to offer!

cowbell 12y ago

I'll wait to see how this pans out first, thanks... http://phys.org/news/2014-06-microsoft-court-overseas.html http://phys.org/news/2014-06-microsoft-court-overseas.html

us0r 12y ago
Have you been reading the rest of the news over the last year or so? If they want it, they are taking it. That is of course unless governments aren't already sharing. I had a potential client from the Netherlands (pre-NSA) say no thanks as we are a US based company and he didn't want the possibility of the US government obtaining his data. Fair enough I wasn't going to change his mind. Those who travel frequently internationally know (or should) about a program called Global Entry. Basically let's you go though the border using a machine instead of talking to an immigration officer. At the time it was available to US citizens (with a squeaky clean record) and Dutch citizens. What kind of information sharing must the Dutch be doing with the US to allow us to basically open our borders? Back to data centers and pretending governments aren't in bed with the NSA for some reason or another and a non US company owns the data center. Who do you think is providing the pipe going into that data center? Almost certainly a US company (or it is 1-2 hops away).
molf 12y ago
How would this be different in Ireland (eu-west-1)?

dmourati 12y ago

Note, a region is not a data center. A region is a collection of two or more Availability Zones (AZ). You can think of an AZ as a data center. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/images/aws_regions.png http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/images/aw...

thirsteh 12y ago
But even an AZ is not necessarily one physical data center; it may be many.
- dmourati 12y ago
  Agree, but it is somewhat unclear.
vacri 12y ago
There's always at least three - there's a 'hidden' datacentre in each region if you can only see two AZs.
- tiernano 12y ago
  for example eu-west-1: AWS bought that big warehouse in Tallaght, and it is somewhat operational, but not "live". You cant select it.

jafingi 12y ago

Awesome! But would still love to have a location in Amsterdam directly on the AMS-IX.

iamtew 12y ago
Luckily most locations in Amsterdam worth their salt is connected to AMS-IX, https://ams-ix.net/connect-to-ams-ix/colocations https://ams-ix.net/connect-to-ams-ix/colocations If AWS setup deployment in Amsterdam, I can't imagine it wouldn't be in one of those places.

tellnes 12y ago

It looks like they have removed most of the DNS records, but eu-central-1.amazonaws.com still gives an authorative answer.

ThePhysicist 12y ago

Honestly this is great news! As the article says, many German companies insist on their data being hosted in a data center in Germany when buying SaaS (for whatever reason). So far, there haven't been any viable options when it comes to "full-stack" IaaS service providers here (except Profitbricks maybe, which doesn't even come close to AWS in terms of functionality or pricing though), so I'm really excited to see Amazon entering this market. Of course the problem remains that Amazon is a US company and thereby required to cooperate with US authorities and hand them over customer data if requested, so some businesses might still not want to host their data there. Still, I'm excited that they're finally coming to Germany !