CloudFront / Route 53 Edge Location in Sydney, Australia

The Sydney Harbor Bridge at sunset,
taken on my first (and so far only) trip down under!

We've just added an edge location in Sydney, Australia (number 33, to be precise) to Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53.

Based on customer requests, internal logging, and the response to our recent survey, we believe that this location will prove to be of great benefit to our customers, providing them with increased performance and reduced latency. We believe that CloudFront's pay-as-you-go pricing model will provide Australian companies and global companies with a very cost-effective alternative to traditional content delivery solutions.

This new location will speed up the delivery of static, streaming and dynamic content to end users in Australia, and will also accelerate the resolution of DNS queries that originate from within the area.

The CloudFront location in Sydney supports the entire array of CloudFront features including support for dynamic content, low minimum content expiration periods, live streaming to multiple devices using FMS 4.5 or  smooth streaming, streaming media, private content, invalidation, and custom origins.

Our customers have put CloudFront to use in a variety of ways. Check out our case studies from the likes of IMDB, PBS, Playfish, Second Life,  Red Lion Hotels, Sega, and Virgin Atlantic to learn more.

It is very easy to get started with CloudFront. Once you have done so, your content will be available more quickly, your application will be more responsive, and your users will be happier!

 Now Hiring
The CloudFront team continues to grow and we have a number of open positions including a Software Development Manager, a Sr. Software Engineer  (5-10 years experience) a Software Engineer (2-3 years experience) and a Product Manager.  You can find a list of all open positions at CloudFront Jobs.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Matt]

Great news for down-under, cheers aws!

[Ronak]

Congrats to amazon S3 for adding new edge location in Sydney, Australia.
From : Bucket Explorer Team (http://www.bucketexplorer.com/)

[Blakekus]

Hooray!

Hopping you add EC2 in the near future :)

[Martin Orliac]

THANK YOU.

[Blindman2k]

You said custom origins twice ... I like custom origins!
Well done AWS. Long time coming.

A.

[Raj Mehta]

Wow a new server addon in Sydney Australia. This will be helpfull to decrease loadtime of our websites in Australia also.

[Qloudstat]

Qloudstat (https://qloudstat.com) has just added support (http://blog.qloudstat.com/2012/06/20/sydney-edge-location/) for the new edge location with pricing metrics updated and SYD1 being available in the edge locations analytics report.

[Mark]

Well done to the AWS team - I know some people down here in Oz who will be very happy (namely myself!)

[Mikebailey]

You've just launched the first awesome DNS hosting in Australia. Thanks Amazon!

oasis:~$ ping ns-971.awsdns-57.net.
PING ns-971.awsdns-57.net (205.251.195.203): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 205.251.195.203: icmp_seq=0 ttl=46 time=15.666 ms
64 bytes from 205.251.195.203: icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=15.966 ms

How do I set things up so my users get the DNS server nearest them? Do you have anycast IPs?

[Andrew]

Awesome.
Do we have to take any action to take advantage of the Sydney edge location, or will this happen automatically?

[Jeff Barr]

Andrew, if you are already using CloudFront or Route 53, your requests (or those from your customers) will be routed to the most advantageous edge location without any action on your part.

[andrew winter]

Unfortunately, as I finally found out from gold support, only one of the 4 DNS servers has an edge location in Sydney. If this was clarified in the original blog announcement it would have saved me several hours.

Are there plans to add the other 3 DNS servers to AU?

andrew

[Colm MacCárthaigh]

Andrew,

For availability reasons, all four Route 53 name servers for are never provided from a single edge location - at most 2 are. This is to ensure that if an edge location fails, or if a network provider drops traffic, that at least 2 other name servers are still reachable and Route 53 hosted domains can be resolved.

At present, our Sydney site is handling traffic for one name server per hosted zone, and we will shortly be increasing that to two. AWS is constantly expanding our list of edge locations and we'll be keen to add service for the other two name servers per hosted zone in the Australia region.

In the meantime, our measurements and experiments tell us that recursive name servers generally "home in" on the closest available authoritative name servers. Recursive resolvers typically query each of the four authoritative name server concurrently until learning which out of the four responds the fastest - and then prefer that name server for queries. Because of this common behaviour, we hope to achieve a good balance between speedy lookup times and 100% DNS availability.

Colm
Amazon Route 53