I had some discussion about AWS (Amazon Web Services) and how to connect to their services, especifically when you run production workloads on virtual machines in AWS. Bringing workloads to public clouds, means that your business and/or your customers are more depended on their (internet) connectivity to be able to reach the workloads running on public cloud environment.
Connectivity matters
There are a multiple solutions out there to make your internet facing connections highly available. Bandwidth-wise there aren’t really any challenges, aside from the costs… in the Netherlands at least. It is easy to get a 1GbE or better connection from your datacenter or office location(s).
The thing we were discussing about, is the latency between you and your public cloud services. Even though it’s strongly depending on what workloads you are planning to run in AWS, you want a decent user experience. Thus a lowest possible network latency towards that workload. That brings us to www.cloudping.info. A nifty web tool to give you an idea on what your latency is to the regions from where AWS offers their services. It’s output looks like this:
Since I’m in the Netherlands, the EU Frankfurt site in Germany is the closest AWS site for me. So an average ping time of 23ms… Note: This number is depending strongly on how your internet provider or your datacenter is connected to AWS via peering on various Internet Exchanges or via transits.