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Does anyone know any colocation providers near the Amazon's US EC2 facility(ies)? I'm needing to colocate a couple servers that need to be able to connect with EC2 with the lowest latency possible.

I can't even find where their facilities are... Any ideas of the best solution or places to start looking?

(ps. I'm well aware that EC2 instances can be configured to do pretty much anything. I have a special need that can't be deployed to EC2.)

brianreavis
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  • I don't think that you can know which data center your instance is in, even if you knew which data centers hosted EC2. Even if you did, once you get a new instance it could move to a different data center. – Amok Nov 11 '09 at 05:27
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    Let me add that low physical distance doesn't necessary mean low latency data transfers. I've seen routes between two adjacent buildings that went around half the country. – Jan Jungnickel Nov 11 '09 at 12:02
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    @Jan: s/country/world/ -- best I had was to get from one side of campus to the other for a few hours one day went through both San Jose and Frankfurt... from Australia. The routing gnomes were having a bad day. – womble Nov 12 '09 at 18:29
  • Why not give them a call? I don't know if they have a number so to speak but if you're a business there might be options available to you with regards to your needs, like maybe keeping all your images restricted to one data center. Never know till you ask. – SpaceManSpiff Nov 11 '09 at 11:55

4 Answers4

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Your next best bet to physical locality would be to position yourself with a provider that has good network connectivity to Amazon's US networks. This is what public peering exchanges exist for.

Based on Amazon's PeeringDB info it seems that their AWS services have a strong presence in Seattle and Palo Alto, and that they peer on PAIX and SIX. So another provider on those IXs would be a good start.

Dan Carley
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  • Woah; learn something new every day. Thanks so much! This is just the direction I needed. I really appreciate it. – brianreavis Nov 11 '09 at 12:55
  • Dan's is a good answer for getting as close as you can from a peering perspective, but remember even one hop across the continent is a ~100+ms hop. You will probably be better off finding something that is two or three hops away but on the east coast (since they call their zones "us-east"). Its largely believed at least one of them is in Virginia: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/09/28/report-amazon-leases-space-in-virginia/ – cagenut Jan 04 '11 at 17:31
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Amazon have multiple data centres for EC2 instances in the US, and I'm pretty sure they won't guarantee that your instances will be rebooted into the same DC. I would suggest rethinking whatever you think you need to do, because your current plan ain't gonna fly.

womble
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ServerBeach's Virginia DC has about a 3ms ping to EC2 US-East. We are using it for exactly this type of need.

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Hint 1: Launch a server in EC2-US. Note its public IP address. Go to any BGP looking glass and identify their correct AS number for EC2 (hint 1 1/2: not 16509). Then use peeringdb or something similar. And then go from there.

Hint 2: EC2 availability zones in EC2 are called us-east-1[a,b,c,d]. Seattle and Palo Alto are not even close to the East Coast.

Amazon is indeed quite secretive about locations of their data centers, so finding a colo close to them will not be easy.

Cheers.