We (rsync.net) should have our Montreal location up and running any month now.
We chose Montreal because that's where I want to hang out and tour in the off hours between building cabinets and burning disks in.
When Montreal is live, people with .ca-only requirements can run their VMs on EC2 and transfer disk images, S3 data and Glacier data between Amazon and rsync.net using 's3cmd':
ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsync/mscdex.exe
Our HN readers rate[1] OR our petabyte rate[1] OR our non-profit/student rate[1] makes this very cost effective, relative to current S3 pricing.
Technically the French announcement should be first if they want to follow language laws. :)
I'm glad to hear this, as it was rather silly that a whole bunch of companies in Canada couldn't use AWS because of requirements around where their data must be stored. Now they will be able to.
I wonder if it'd be possible to write an announcement that uses English words with French origins, sort of like how Zolotas made speeches in English that used Greek words.
Well, mostly the French language. It's certainly not France culture, which is why I assume you're using the scare quotes, although of course there's quite a bit of cultural exchange coming from France.
I imagine it is being primarily driven by the recent vast decline in the Canadian dollar. Just about all of the costs involved are going to be about 30% cheaper compared to a couple of years ago.
Not to mention that hydro quebec has some of the lowest electrical rates around and as a crown corporation (owned by provincial gov.), political considerations can bring the cost down substantially.
OVH is also near Montreal, in Beauharnois next to a large (1900 MW) run-of-the-river hydro plant.
Probably unrelated. Many companies that work with Canadian data are required to keep it within Canada as mandated by the Canadian government, as has been for a fairly long while.
This allows those companies to use AWS rather than moving over to local hosting/compute/etc providers, and personally I have found the domestic hosting environment to be quite poor.
It is related. Even though you are hosting data in Canada, the US government may still have access to the data via Amazon (because it is a U.S. based company) depending on the outcome of that case.
I also saw that as taking undeserved credit at first, but the fact is, this region will be carbon-neutral and they are right to advertise it as such for those who would be interested in hosting in a carbon-neutral environment.
But they chose to put their datacentre in that province, possibly because of the accessible clean power. Why shouldn't they be allowed to advertise it?
Hydro power is a legitimate draw to get businesses into Quebec.
Does this mean AWS will now start charging sales tax in Canada? My costs increased by 13% when Digital Ocean opened up in Toronto and had to charge me HST.
I'm sure your Canadian usage would be subject to GST (which may be why Amazon opted for Montreal target than Toronto) but I think they arrange the subsidiaries so that you don't pay taxes on your usage in other countries.
It doesn't matter for businesses of course, since GST/HST is a reclaimable VAT.
I think they chose Montréal for cheap electricity rather than sales tax issues. My residential rates more than doubled when I moved to Toronto. Looks like business rates follow a similar pattern: http://www.hydroquebec.com/business/rates-and-billing/rates/...
Yes, the Ontario government has horribly mismanaged the power utility, with extremely high rates resulting. I figured that Amazon probably wouldn't be paying retail rates, but if they couldn't negotiate anything better that would definitely explain why they avoided Ontario.
I pay 5% GST - there is no HST/PST in Alberta. But I pay this 5% GST on droplets that are in the NYC and SFO datacenters.
The credit card charge now comes from Digital Ocean Canada, but the prices are still listed in USD. They appear to convert to CAD before charging my credit card.
Duh, you're right of course. I know this, too -- I have to go through the same headache of charging different rates to my Canadian customers based on where they're located.
I must have been asleep when I wrote that comment... alas, it's too late to edit it now.
I pay 5% GST - there is no HST/PST in Alberta. But I pay this 5% GST on droplets that are in the NYC and SFO datacenters.
Right, if the service is being provided to you by a Canadian company then they have to charge GST regardless of where the servers are. The same goes for Tarsnap -- my servers are EC2 instances in the US, but I remit GST/HST for my Canadian customers.
That is very short-term, though -- small businesses are only required to file GST/HST returns annually, but you can elect to file quarterly or even monthly, and I've always had a cheque in my hands within two weeks.
the closest to anything really mainstream I'm aware of currently is CloudFare in Kenya. When I saw this last year it gave me some hope that the bigger players may start to look at Africa seriously in the near future. https://blog.cloudflare.com/mombasa-kenya-cloudflares-43rd-d...
As a western Canadian, it's fun (?) to joke about Quebec separation. (Indifference/irrelevance, right or wrong, is a common western view on it, I think.)
That's actually way higher than I thought. But if support for the Bloc Quebecois is any indication, the sovereignty movement was dealt a big blow in our fall 2015 election. They lost a lot of federal seats and smaller polls suggest popular support for sovereignty might be around 31% now. https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/quebec-indep...
Still, it's fun/interesting to talk about. As a westerner. ;-)
This is the first Ive heard about an ohio data center, that will be good news for us in the midwest - wish it was a bit further west than that but still better than East.
It's great AWS is expanding. Here's to hoping they fix the dire reliability issues they've been facing every now and then. I looked really hard at using AWS for ELB and other services but GCP won me over because they solved the ELB and scalability pre-warm up issue(s).
Since the provincial government is already giving huge tax credits to the video game industries, I'm wondering the government will be giving Amazon any financial incentives to implement that in Montréal.
"...in the coming year". They've been claiming that the Canada datacenter is coming for awhile now... disappointed there are no details on launch date.
This will have interesting effects for US patents that are practiced on AWS machines in Canada to serve client devices in the US. All the steps of a method claim in a patent must be performed in the US to infringe, so choosing to use machines in Canada will create defenses for many extant US patent claims.
This only works for method claims, though. Device claims in patents are a different beast.
And of course, this isn't new, but a AWS region in Canada will make the issue more prevalent.
> a AWS region in Canada will make the issue more prevalent
How on earth will it? The EU region launched 9 years ago & AP 6 years ago. Would the prevalence be in Canadian businesses who weren't aware of these other regions and the legions of other hosting providers available outside of the USA?
We chose Montreal because that's where I want to hang out and tour in the off hours between building cabinets and burning disks in.
When Montreal is live, people with .ca-only requirements can run their VMs on EC2 and transfer disk images, S3 data and Glacier data between Amazon and rsync.net using 's3cmd':
Our HN readers rate[1] OR our petabyte rate[1] OR our non-profit/student rate[1] makes this very cost effective, relative to current S3 pricing.[1] email us.