The ELC Community Blog

A knowledge exchange on Ruby on Rails and Agile Development

Europe, meet Amazon S3

by Ryan Garver on November 07, 2007

Amazon announced today that they are opening a new datacenter in Europe. This datacenter will be playing host to a new European S3. The goal of this move was to address the concerns that the AWS suite of services were not well suited for global users. S3 has been getting some negative reviews by many Europeans as idealistic and impractical with the primary justification being the terrible latency experienced from across the pond.

ELC uses the AWS toolset extensively. At RailsConf Europe I was very surprised to hear people's apprehension with S3 and EC2. Many were convinced that S3 was doomed to fail in the web application space because of the poor performance outside of North America. It seems that Amazon was listening.

I was surprised, and frankly excited to see that they have explicitly differentiated the European S3 and the the American S3. Storage and request fees are slightly more expensive. This may be a reflection of the differing energy costs. Having separate EU and US storage facilities that can be managed by the developers themselves was a smart move on Amazon's part. This gives application developers the opportunity to optimize the distribution of static content that may be location specific. It also leaves open the option of dynamically switching asset servers based on IP location. Exciting! If they do eventually try to unite the services I hope that they make multi-homed IPs a possibility with S3; then we'll have a real CDN.

Originally posted on RAG on Rails.