Amazon Web Services announced on March 2 that they had added a Tokyo data center as its 5th in the world, 2nd in Asia after Singapore.
Almost all of Amazon Web Services except Elastic MapReduce, Elastic Beanstalk, Import/Export are already available. The official blog says that there are several Japanese companies have been already using the Tokyo region as a private beta testers, including Zynga Japan.
The following Amazon Japan’s banner tells “Cloud Has Landed in Japan – get new applications and services from new Tokyo data center”.
The official blog says “I can tell you that private beta testers have been putting it to the test and have reported single digit latency (e.g. 1-10 ms) from locations in and around Tokyo”.
Yuuki Namikawa, known by his web infrastructure blog measured the latency on the release date, and got around 2.7-14.8 msec round-trip-time(RTT), which is quite fast if you compare it with RTT with Amazon’s US West or Singapore data centers.
Although the fees on the price list for Tokyo data center are bit more expensive than other regions, Japanese developers react favorably on the price. Generally, price of web hosting tends to be more expensive in Japan than in US so the little addition still keeps the Amazon’s price competitive.
There have been several Japanese “cloud” service providers, like Nifty Cloud, Sakura Internet, etc., used by Japanese web companies and startups.
The rumor of the Tokyo data center had been talked about a year, as Amazon once said they had plan to open two data centers in Asia, and some people leaked on Twitter that Amazon Japan might be seeking to rent a data center in Tokyo.
Even with US and Singapore data centers, there are many Japanese web services using Amazon Web Services. Only disadvantage people here complained was geological distance to other data centers, which causes inevitable latency. This new Tokyo region may make the trend fast.
