Amazon Elastic Cloud service storms Europe

EC2 instances go international

By Austin Modine • Get more from this author

Posted in Developer, 10th December 2008 08:02 GMT

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Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service has finally extended to Europe.

The online bookseller announced it will spin up EC2 virtual server instances in two "availability zones" in Europe, hopefully giving lower latency to customers who previously had to beam their virtual workload across the pond.

While Amazon's S3 storage-4-rent service has been available from Europe-based locations for some time now, the firm's Web Services arm hasn't been nearly so quick to flex its processing power abroad.

Adam Selipsky, veep of product management at AWS told us it was a matter of Amazon's priorities in getting its storage infrastructure ready first. But having EC2 available in close proximity to its European S3 storage has lately become a top customer request.

European developers and business can immediately begin using EC2 features like Elastic IP addresses and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) - but EC2 support for Windows Server and SQL Server in the EU will arrive "in the coming weeks."

As always, Amazon gets a bit dodgy when asked specifics about their Web Services data centers. For instance, Selipsky told us their European-based metal consists of both infrastructure they built themselves and "other strategies" (we can only suppose that's a roundabout way to say "didn't"). So we'll just assume the two undisclosed locations of the zones are Dick Cheney's new summer villas and wonder no more lest DHS comes a-knockin'.

Data transfer fees will be the same as its US counterpart, but customers will be charged about $.01 more per hour for the EC2 instances themselves, due to the increased cost of running a data center in Europe according to Amazon.

European prices are:

Instances (Linux/UNIX)

Standard (per instance hour consumed)
$0.11 for small instances 
$0.44 for large instances 
$0.88 for x-large instances

High CPU (per instance hour consumed)
$0.22 for medium instances 
$0.88 for x-large instances

Data Transfer

$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in 
$0.17 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out 
$0.13 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out 
$0.11 per GB - next 100TB
 $0.10 per GB – over 150TB

For those curious to compare, Amazon's American EC2 pricing is listed here. ®

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