If latency has been an issue for you when developing and using AWS, then your pain could be over. Overnight, Amazon published a blog post announcing the expansion of AWS into Sydney.
The new Sydney location will have access to a gamut of Amazon services, including Elastic Compute Cloud (including Elastic Block Storage, Virtual Private Cloud, VM import/export, auto-scaling and Elastic Load Balancing), Elastic Map Reduce, DynamoDB, SimpleDB, Relational Database Service, CloudFormation, Simple Queue Service, Simple Notification Service, CloudWatch, Simple Storage Service, Storage Gateway, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFront, Route 53, and Direct Connect.
Pricing in the Australian region has been quite a hit and miss affair. For computing power, the prices are equivalent or even better than other Asia Pacific instances, whereas storage is much more expensive in Australia, and for Amazon’s Simple services, the pricing is on par with the US.
With a standard on-demand instance of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, the pricing for Sydney is identical to that of Singapore, and cheaper than that being offered in Tokyo.
| US East Linux | US East Windows | Sydney Linux | Sydney Windows | Singapore Linux | Singapore Windows | Tokyo Linux | Tokyo Windows | |
| Small | $0.065/hr | $0.115/hr | $0.085/hr | $0.115/hr | $0.085/hr | $0.115/hr | $0.092/hr | $0.115/hr |
| Medium | $0.130/hr | $0.230/hr | $0.170/hr | $0.230/hr | $0.170/hr | $0.230/hr | $0.184/hr | $0.230/hr |
| Large | $0.260/hr | $0.460/hr | $0.340/hr | $0.460/hr | $0.340/hr | $0.460/hr | $0.368/hr | $0.460/hr |
| Extra Large | $0.520/hr | $0.920/hr | $0.680/hr | $0.920/hr | $0.680/hr | $0.920/hr | $0.736/hr | $0.920/hr |
Where Australia starts to feel the pinch is in storage. Using the Amazon Simple Storage Service, the pricing for a standard storage instance is as follows:
| US Standard | Sydney | Singapore | Tokyo | |
| First 1 TB / month | $0.125/GB | $0.140/GB | $0.125/GB | $0.130/GB |
| Next 49 TB / month | $0.110/GB | $0.125/GB | $0.110/GB | $0.115/GB |
| Next 450 TB / month | $0.095/GB | $0.115/GB | $0.095/GB | $0.100/GB |
| Next 500 TB / month | $0.090/GB | $0.105/GB | $0.090/GB | $0.095/GB |
| Next 4,000 TB / month | $0.080/GB | $0.095/GB | $0.080/GB | $0.085/GB |
| Over 5,000 TB / month | $0.055/GB | $0.070/GB | $0.055/GB | $0.060/GB |
Of the regions offered for storage, only Sao Paulo is more expensive than Sydney.
A number of services, such as Simple Queue Service and Simple Notification Service, offer identical pricing in Australia and the US.
Amazon said that over 10,000 organisations in Australia and New Zealand are already on AWS. A selection of AWS customers includes the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, MYOB, and Halfbrick Studios (makers of Fruit Ninja).
