An AWS Region is coming to France

For those in London wondering where is best for UK based customers, it seems, for London at least, this <i>could</i> be an improvement over Dublin (where Frankfurt is slower), as Paris is roughly 70 miles closer. Of course, depending on where &#x2F; when [1] a UK-based data centre is released, I&#x27;d imagine that would be faster still.<p>Currently Ireland vs. Frankfurt is (more data needed of course)[2]:<p><pre><code> Europe (Ireland): 25 ms 27 ms 24 ms Europe (Frankfurt): 39 ms 39 ms 42 ms </code></pre> And Frankfurt is about 100 miles further than Dublin.<p>But for a quick test, this looks like a good tool: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudping.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudping.info&#x2F;</a><p>Will be interested to test this once released to see UK &#x2F; Paris vs. Dublin.<p>[1] Article states UK region &quot;due in coming months&quot;. No location announced?<p>[2] Hitting ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com vs. ec2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com.

This is great. I operate a French website targeted to French customers, this will improve latency compared to Ireland.<p>This might also allow for mixing critical server roles hosted in other Paris data centers with AWS.<p>I&#x27;m thinking about connecting a web server (in AWS) with a DB server (in another Paris DC) while keeping the latency at a low level.

What is the state of the temporary spy laws in France?<p>Shouldn&#x27;t it at least be mentioned in the announcement that the french government can pretty much ask Amazon for any of your data without a warrant. Or is the situation better than a year ago?<p>EDIT: Warrant is apparently needed as noplay said.

Still no further info on the London region since their announcement post[1] said:<p>&gt; <i>Today, I am excited to add the United Kingdom to that list! The AWS UK region will be our third in the European Union (EU), and we&#x27;re shooting to have it ready by the end of 2016 (or early 2017). This region will provide even lower latency and strong data sovereignty to local users.</i><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allthingsdistributed.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;aws-announces-uk-region.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allthingsdistributed.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;aws-announces-uk...</a>

I do sincerely wished Amazon would have consider changing their AWS service management UI and workflow as well as epanding their servers around the globe.<p>Currently it is an incredibly inefficient design of a service management trying to do everything yet many are dependent for using it.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;aws&#x2F;coming-in-2017-new-aws-region-in-france&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;aws&#x2F;coming-in-2017-new-aws-regi...</a>

Its worth commenting that we here in Microsoft Azure team (our cloud platform) have data centers in 30 regions including UK, Germany, etc. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;regions&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;regions&#x2F;</a><p>Our platform is very mature now I wish more folks would give it a shot.<p>p.s. we also take EU people data privacy very seriously. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thefastmode.com&#x2F;technology-solutions&#x2F;9077-microsoft-partners-deutsche-telekom-to-open-azure-cloud-data-center-in-germany" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thefastmode.com&#x2F;technology-solutions&#x2F;9077-micros...</a>

So this is great however I have a very large concern.<p>In a U.S. AWS data center, I am very confident (right now) that my encryption keys and encrypted data will never be given out to any governmental agency. Even with a warrant, they can not access my data unencrypted.<p>What will Amazon do when the French government says hand us all of your keys or else...<p>As our data is all extremely sensitive financial information, we really can not even take that chance until we know.<p>Clarification: We send all data over HTTPS with AES 256 encryption. If authorities have a warrant for data, can we hand them the encrypted data and say the keys are in the U.S. and we can&#x27;t give them to you?

There is STILL no AWS region in Israel.<p>All Internet traffic in and out of Israel goes through three undersea cables connecting the country with Turkey, Greece, and Italy, and as such suffer from the kind of lag that happens when you&#x27;re separated from your destination server by a couple thousand kilometers, usually more. There are no local cloud providers and the local entrepreneurial culture (which is MASSIVE for such a small country) either has to pay for cloud resources in Europe or has to pay for local non-cloud hosting, which is orders of magnitude more expensive and running on relatively ancient hardware (the local VPS shops have little incentive to upgrade).<p>Do we have to beg for Amazon to come here?!