Amazon EC2 Crosses the Atlantic

You can now launch Amazon EC2 instances in Europe!

We've created a new region for Europe, separate and distinct from the existing region in the United States.For fault tolerance, data separation, and stability, each EC2 region is an entity unto itself; issues within one region won't affect the other one. This means that Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), security groups, and SSH keypairs must be created anew in each region. We're working on tools to make it easy to move this information between regions. Also, as we learn more about how customers use multiple regions, we will add APIs to make it even easier for them to do so. There's a new Feature Guide to Amazon EC2 Regions with a lot of helpful information, including some Frequently Asked Questions.

With the exception of support for Microsoft Windows and for Amazon DevPay (both of which will be ready before too long), every feature of EC2 is available in the new region, including Elastic Block Storage and Elastic IP Addresses.

The command line tools have been updated. The new ec2-describe-regions command lists all of the available regions, along with the endpoint URL needed to access them. A number of commands now accept the --region option. For example, this option allows ec2-run-instances to be used to launch instances in any available region.

The new region is now open for use by all interested developers. Pricing for EC2 instances, EBS storage, and I/O requests are slightly higher than in the US, reflecting differences in our operating costs in the regions.

Of course, we think that this new region will enable developers to do an even better job of serving their customers, giving them the ability to locate processing power in closer proximity to their user base while also helping them to meet EU data privacy requirements. In conjunction with the European version of S3, developers residing in or targeting markets in Europe now have powerful, local processing resources at hand.

Now that the dust has settled, I've got a few more related links:

• Alexis at CohesiveFT, took the time to write a very detailed post. He also notes (in a second post) that their Elastic Server product is now able to deploy to EC2 in Europe.
• Amazon CTO Werner Vogels adds his take, Expanding the Cloud: Amazon EC2 in Europe. Werner has fielded many requests for a local instance of EC2 as part of his travel to Europe time and time again this past year.
• The Financial Times says that EC2 is no longer a mid-Atlantic kludge (whatever that means) and says that "Now comes the step that will finally turn this into a true European cloud: customers will be able to elect to have their data processed as well as stored and distributed in Europe."
• Thorsten from RightScale talks about the reasons why we created separate clouds and reveals some of their thinking with regard to operating in such an environment.
• There's a very helpful thread in the AWS EC2 Developer Forum.
• The Solutious blog talks about Using Amazon EC2 in Europe.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Jim T]

Hi Jeff, a quick question about EC2 EU Legal and gambling.

In section "5.5.6. Services and Applications" of the agreement here:
http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/#5.5

It states that gambling is not permitted in any way on the servers. It states that this is due to being under US law. However, if the EU servers would be under EU law and are completely separate services, would gambling services be available under that region? The agreement text hasn't been updated to reflect the fact that the European servers are not hosted in the US.

As a developer for an EU bookmaker who would like to use EC2 to test some back-end systems occasionally, this is of some considerable interest to me.

[Mijndert Stuij]

Congratulations to the AWS team for bringing EC2 to Europe! This was the only thing I needed to really bring my applications to the cloud.

[Tom Gleeson]

Excellent news!

I see that DevPay will also eventually be available in Europe; does that mean that developers with European bank accounts will then be able to use the service (currently only those with US banking facilities can do so) ?

Tom

[Pieter]

Great!
This timing could not have been better for my project. I'm just finishing an AMI for use in Europe.

[Phil]

This is excellent news indeed, been so much waiting for it!

Any hints when you will launch amazon payments in Europe?

All the best
Phil

[Morten]

Great! Finally!

However it is highly annoying to find out that "Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), security groups, and SSH keypairs must be created anew in each region".

In particular, one should be able to use the same SSH keypairs! You need to fix this. Also, at least a free copy function for AMI's is needed so we do not have to recreate AMI's.

[michael dorsik]

I think this was a matter of time and it finally happened.