AWS Olympics: Speed-Testing EC2 and S3 Across Regions

For anyone interested in optimizing S3 performance, I recommend Jim Sorenson's "Building Scalable Applications on Amazon S3" from re:Invent.<p><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/building-scalable-applications-on-amazon-s3-stg303" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/building-scalabl...</a><p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYnVRYbUR6A" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYnVRYbUR6A</a>

Any idea why the results are not symmetrical? Upload from Virginia to California is twice as fast as from California to Viriginia (and it's even worse with US &#60;-&#62; Japan).<p>Are there strategical interests to not have a symmetric link?

You know, I know it's 2013 and all, and things like this shouldn't amaze me, but the fact that you can get data from Australia to Brazil in _minutes_ is still kind of astounding to me.

Australia is has low bandwidth to the rest of the world largely due its geography and capacity/path of the undersea cables connecting the country.<p>Geographically its relatively close to Singapore (compared to other data centers anyway), all of the cables from the eastern side of the country either go up to Japan via Guam or go to the US via Hawaii. Its not uncommon to see a route from Sydney to Singapore go through the US, and/or Japan before reaching Singapore.

Keep in mind that the S3 Virgnia location (known as US Standard Regionin AWS terms) includes endpoints in Virginia and in the Pacific Northwest. Hence that may be why the Virginia to Virginia numbers were high compared to the other regions.<p>"The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps." <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/s3/</a>

Interesting!! We've tried conducting similar tests where I work a few months ago. We had to deploy a few servers and tried to figure out the optimal spread.

Thanks for putting this up. I'd be very intrested to know if anyone has ever done a similar test with Azure?

Interesting. It might also be useful to see latencies between regions (or even availability zones).