How could I determine which AWS location is best for serving customers from a particular region?

Question

AWS has several locations for storage and EC2 instances to run upon with different pricing. How could I determine which location is best for a particular region. Is it intui

Answer 1

Amazon is now offering the ability to route to a datacenter based on lowest end-user latency. It's Route53's new "Latency Based Routing"!

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/CreatingLatencyRRSets.html

Answer 2

Testing latency to different regions is obviously advisable! I'm located in Australia and many users here get better latency to US West than to Singapore - in part it comes down to local ISPs peering and international connectivity. It's relatively straightforward to test if you have users in the region you're targeting.

Reliability on the AWS side (i.e. not user network issues) is mostly a consequence of deployment across multiple Availability Zones. There are more choices in US regions than in APAC ones simply because they've been serving those markets longer. A side effect of this is that features are deployed relatively late to Singapore/Tokyo - normally new features start rollout in US East.

As you already have S3 and EC2 in mind as services you'd like to use and they're both available in closer regions, evaluate whether newer web services from AWS are immediately important - if not, shoot for something (latency) close by.

Answer 3

Good tool/site to Check Latency from our location

http://www.cloudwatch.in/