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AWS announces new region in Canada

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Re: AWS announces new region in Canada

#101
post #57
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OVH has a monster data center there too. The region has very cheap power due to a lot of hydroelectric available.

OVH is actually located right inside a hydro dam about 15 minutes away from the city: http://www.hydroquebec.com/visit/monteregie/beauharnois.html

Where do you see that info? Couldn't find anything that they're actually in the dam, rather very close by?

Re: AWS announces new region in Canada

#103

This announcement actually broke some code of mine today. I have a scheduled AWS Lambda function that downloads the current EC2 Price List every hour to make some real-time cost savings calculations for stopped resources. The addition of the Canada prices to that file made it just a bit too large for the memory assigned to the function, causing a silent "Process exited without completing request" crash. Good times.

Purely out of curiosity; are you allowed to share how much time this cost you to make, and how much money / month it saves you?

I love the idea, and the fact that you actually implemented it. :)

Re: AWS announces new region in Canada

#104

When did Montreal become "central" Canada? Why didn't Amazon call it Canada East instead?

As far as I've ever known, Ontario and Quebec are central Canada.

Central Canada means Manitoba mostly, since it is geographic centre as well as being in central timezone.

Re: AWS announces new region in Canada

#106
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea what would a data center pay per year for cooling? Would it be worthwhile to build in a cooler location where cooling would be free in the winter? And maybe even (somehow) freeze water in the winter and melt it in the summer to provide additional "free" cooling? (Might be a bit of a stretch)

Now for cooling, the montreal region has subzero temps from lateish november to somthing like almost april... Apparently Wikipedia has a half decent article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_in_Canada Not sure about that freeze water in the winter and use it in the summer idea at such a low latitude... But yes, using an artificial lake (or even a real one... given the population does not go bersek about prot…

I got an even better idea. Why not build the datacenter inside the hydroelectric dam? You get electricity from the turbines and cooling from the artificial lake at what's likely to be a high altitude. Now all you need it rock solid connectivity but you've got an incredibly small carbon footprint.

Re: AWS announces new region in Canada

#107
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to [1] it seems there are 2 az. 1: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/

S3, Dynamo and some other servicea always have three AZs, sometimes they only expose 2 EC2 AZs to save money in new/small regions. James Hamilton just announced that they were going to stop doing this but I guess this region was already under construction.

Makes sense, thanks for correcting me.

Re: AWS announces new region in Canada

#108

This announcement actually broke some code of mine today. I have a scheduled AWS Lambda function that downloads the current EC2 Price List every hour to make some real-time cost savings calculations for stopped resources. The addition of the Canada prices to that file made it just a bit too large for the memory assigned to the function, causing a silent "Process exited without completing request" crash. Good times.

Purely out of curiosity; are you allowed to share how much time this cost you to make, and how much money / month it saves you? I love the idea, and the fact that you actually implemented it. :)

It's part of a larger system called Hanover (built entirely on Lambda/API Gateway/DynamoDB/static S3) that handles scheduled shutdowns and cost savings reports across our many AWS development accounts. We built the shutdown POC in less than a week - the front end reporting console took a bit longer. We may open source it at some point. In the meantime you can check out:

- A session my boss did at re:Invent that touches on some of our cloud management tools, including Hanover [0]

- A blog post I did back when we were putting this together that explains our approach to calculating EC2 prices for live instances (it's not as easy as you would think/hope) [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Epx_32c3c6s&feature=youtu.be [1] https://forrestbrazeal.com/2016/09/25/adventures-in-aws-unde...

Re: AWS announces new region in Canada

#109

sure don't have to worry about keeping the servers cool eh? :)

The location will help, but it's not like Montreal is in the frozen tundra. It's about 30 miles from the border with Vermont. All of Washington state is north of Montreal.

It may not be frozen tundra, but Montreal does get quite a bit of snow, a lot more snow than the tundra does. AWS should use one of those giant snow dumps for cooling purposes -- those things often have snow well into August.
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