AWS have launched their much awaited region in
Australia,
expanding their region coverage
AWS Sydney supports all of the major services including EC2, EBS, RDS and S3 as well as many others. This opens up the opportunity for many other enterprises in Australia to adopt the cloud and to keep their data in Australia.
During our interaction with customers of RightScale and users of PlanForCloud, we have seen first hand that many Australian enterprises launched their serves in nearby AWS Singapore. However, now they can start to migrate their systems to the new region:
1 - To forecast their cloud costs on AWS Australia using PlanForCloud. There are differences in price between many regions, read on.
2 - To migrate their deployments over to the new region using RightScale's automation engine. Get a free demo of RightScale here.
With the addition of these prices to PlanForCloud, we now have over 10,000 prices listed! Here is how you can filter through all the different options:
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| Server selection screen of PlanForCloud |
A couple of interesting points about Sydney's prices:
- EC2 prices are the same as Singapore and Europe (apart from Spot Instances)
- EBS prices are the same as Singapore except EBS Snapshots to S3, which are a little more in Sydney
- S3 prices are the same as Northern California
- RDS prices are the same as Europe, Northern California and Singapore
- Data transfer prices are cheaper than South America but are, on average, slightly higher than Singapore and Tokyo. "This is to be expected as Australian bandwidth is famously expensive" explains our new AWS Australian regional manager Giri - who is hiring!
We thought it would be good to have a quick look at one of the popular instance sizes and see how this compares to all other regions. Here are the hourly costs for m1.large instances across all regions:
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| AWS m1.large instance cost across different regions |
Here are some things that could help you navigate the cost differences between regions:
Data Transfer costs are different
Many enterprises fail to look at the data transfer costs between different components in their deployments and between their deployments and their users. We have designed a feature that you can use to model all data transfers between components and see how much these will cost. After logging into PlanForCloud, click on a deployment and select the Data Transfers tab. You will see this:
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| Model Data Transfer costs in PlanForCloud |
Different currencies
AWS have always charged users in USD, however, many of their users will need to convert this to their local currency to see how much deployments will cost. We have designed a live currency conversion in PlanForCloud. Simply go to the Update Account page and select a Report Currency:
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| Change currency for Cost Reports in PlanForCloud |
All cost reports will now be generated in your selected currency using live exchange rates.
We will do a more detailed analysis of the different regional costs for multiple cloud providers soon, watch our Twitter feed to keep up to date.
-- Hassan
Product manager at PlanForCloud
