Amazon launched its cloud computing service in Asia Pacific

Launches server and storage on demand from Singapore data centres.
Amazon.com has launched its cloud computing services in the Asia Pacific region with services being available from undisclosed data centres in Singapore as of today.

Amazon.com told iTnews the Singapore-based versions of Amazon Web Services (Enterprise Cloud Compute and Simple Storage Service) will provide Australian customers with lower latency times (ie better response times) than connecting to the AWS cloud compute in the United States.
Amazon.com senior vice president of web services Andy Jassy told iTnews that the Singapore facilities are a beachhead on a wider expansion plan (read the full interview with Jassy hereg).

The company has hopes of launching its own presence in Australia in the near future.

Amazon's pricing for the Asia Pacific region [see tables below] is in line with prices the company offers customers in Europe, which in some cases (such as on-demand instances of Windows servers) is actually cheaper than the same service offered from the West Coast of the USA.

The only sting in the tail is the price of data transfer out (sometimes referred to as "egress") - which is 4c per GB higher in the Asia Pacific, some twenty to thirty percent more expensive than Amazon services elsewhere in the world.

The cost of international traffic has been a common deterrent for some Australian enterprises from porting their apps to the Amazon cloud.

An import/export service, via which customers can mail Amazon.com physical disk rather than uploading their data onto the cloud via the network, won't be available from day one. But Jassy said it "will be available eventually."
Better performance
Jassy said many Australian customers that already connect with Amazon's EC2 and S3 services in the United States should enjoy better performance connecting to the Singapore cloud.

"You will see a similar latency [between Australia and Singapore] to what you would experience between the East and West coast of America," Jassy said.

"Remember that EC2 was only available to the East Coast of America for a very long time - but now most of our customers are on the West Coast, in the Bay area. But for a time, there were lots of workloads for which people are happy with that level of latency."
Why Singapore?

The Singapore service will be based in multiple data centres on the island in order to create an "availability zone" between separate facilities.

Salesforce.com and Microsoft (Azure) have also released cloud-based services from data centres in Singapore.

Jassy said the country was chosen on how many places it can serve from its data centre presence (Singapore is close to the big guns of Asia), the cost and robustness of infrastructure (some of the world's largest data centre builders, including Equinix, have built multiple data centres in Singapore), whether the right talent is available and the ease with which Amazon.com can work with the Government.

"We had to pick a country to start because we couldn't do them all at once," he said. "In the fullness of time we intend to have a number of countries.

"We are very interested in Australia - it has some very interesting businesses and we are very hopeful and optimistic about have a data centre presence in Australia in the near future."

Will Australian companies export to a Singapore-based cloud? Read the full interview with Jassy here.

ASIA PACIFIC PRICING

Pirate attack on Amazon cruise ship-11 August, 2009

IMA - An Australian couple have told The Age in Melbourne about a terrifying encounter with pirates who robbed the luxury cruise ship on which they were travelling in the Amazon.

Christina Ibbotson and Keith Lawson had just started their month-long South American holiday when gunmen stormed their cruise ship on the Ucayali River in the Peruvian Amazon in a dawn raid.

There were 12 Australians among the 28 middle-aged passengers on board the MV Aqua, which had been attacked and ransacked by pirates only 10 days earlier.

Ms Ibbotson said she first became aware of the attack when she heard shots fired outside her cabin and saw a man armed with a machine-gun coming towards her.

''Your mind just doesn't register that pirates had boarded the ship and when I saw the bandit coming towards me, I just shut the door,'' she said.

The couple then endured a terrifying 25-minute wait in their cabin wondering if all the other passengers had been murdered or if the pirates planned to take them as hostages for ransom.

The bandits stormed the couple's cabin last and robbed them at gunpoint of all their cash, cameras and jewellery before forcing them into another cabin.

Most of the passengers - including four Britons, two Americans and four Spaniards - were in the ship's breakfast room when the pirates attacked and were robbed, then bound and forced to lie on the floor.

Ms Ibbotson said most of the passengers were angry they had not been warned of the first pirate attack and said they had not heard anything from the Peruvian company Aqua Expeditions since.

The Peruvian Minister for Tourism, Martin Perez, has reportedly vowed to provide Coast Guard and National Police escorts for cruises in the region, to step up patrols and to increase security officers on board vessels in a bid to salvage the area's tourism reputation.

''This incident is of national importance as tourism is a vital activity in the region,'' Perez said.

Aqua Expeditions has reportedly changed its itinerary to avoid the area of the latest raid.

Source: The Age

Noah's Ark found off Peru coast

The Chilean Navy has uncovered a "Noah's Ark" of contraband exotic animals - some of them endangered - which were being shipped from Peru.
A Navy patrol boat from the Chilean port of Arica noticed a boat heading for shore with its lights off.
After checking on board for a registration, the authorities discovered the animals, most of which were from the Amazon jungle.
Sonia Legg reports.