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.
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]
FWIW, it's not 'a data center'. It's at least 3 a few miles apart from each other. They might (probably do) still end up in Montreal, depending on where those city/county limits lie.
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.
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 protecting the wildlife) as a heat echanger might be an idea. Lake would most likely come close to freezing in the winter (need to engineer this properly) but in the summer you could get water from the depths to provide extra cooling power. Idea, put a beach there, get cheers from the population.
Other idea: run a river from up north in your datacenter and you've got a nice cooling strategy for basically... free.
Better idea yet... Build the datacenter on top of the hydroelectric damn... Last thing to do is to run the lines... Not like Quebec had not mastered running lines over hundreds of kilometers anyways, they've been importing power from the north for decades.
Water is most dense around 4°C. Accordingly the bottom of a large body like the great lakes is near that temperature year round. This is part of the reason why fish can survive in lakes that freeze over in the winter.
This is exploited in deep water source cooling [1].
Such a thing is implemented in Lake Ontario since 2004.
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.
A lot factors go into picking data center locations, ambient temperature being one of them.
Other factors include network connectivity, risk of local government wanting to access data, price of electricity (you still have to power machines, even if you get cooling for free), labor cost to build/maintain the center, proximity to an airport, risks of natural disasters, etc.
If we believe the Cacti graphs, over the past several weeks the Montréal QIX peaked at 50Gbps[1]. Your comment implies that the QIX might be running over a mere 40Gbps link, but presumably their aggregate link capacity is (much?) higher than that.
That's 40gbps of voluntary (technically settlement free, but not in the usual meaning of the term) peering, not paid transit. Paid transit numbers are several orders of magnitude higher, and total traffic numbers are unknown.
Yes that has been a problem... Let me tell you, everybody would have been investing in the infrastructure if there had been a social desire to actually attract datacenters...
Nobody will invest in good internet lines if the only thing to go around is middle-aged people who think the internet is useless...
until very recently the competition for serious backbone IP carriers in major canadian cities (vancouver, calgary, montreal, toronto) was terrible and much higher priced compared to buying IP transit in a place like seattle, chicago, north virginia, NYC, los angeles, etc.
Its mentioned on the wiki page , and several trade magazines about servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnois,_Quebec It's on the dam's land and about 300 meters from the actual dam itself.
There were rumors that it would be in Baie D’Urfe, which is on the southwest tip of the island, fairly far from downtown Montreal. Here's a job posting for "data center security" which seems to be located out there: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/452269
So many companies that legally required a server physically located in Canada are going to be running to AWS now, practically everyone touching health care, government, personal data, or even getting some level of government funding likely was obligated to keep things within Canadian borders.
Yup. I've been eagerly awaiting this since they announced earlier this year. I was getting worried I'd have to contract with a different provider. I'm a heavy RDS user, too, so I wasn't looking forward to it.
I work for a large healthcare organization and multiple times have seen group messages instructing staff not to use surveymonkey since the data was hosted in the States, and something about the Patriot act allowing US authorities to view the data without warrants or something.
I work in education, and in BC we have the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) that stops us from using anything good. SurveyMonkey just went and bought a Canadian run survey company and moved all the servers, we had to drop our contracts... everyone is left without anything.
We def can't use Dropbox, Google Docs/Drive, anything above Office 2010. Slack is frowned upon even. It is kind of brutal.
Why would FIPPA affect Office versions past 2010? 2013, 2015 and 2016 are available as standalone (non-365 subscription) versions, and regardless of your purchase model (subscription, retail, volume, etc) you can still store documents locally.
Hi all, I'm the CPO and founder of www.surveypal.com and I just got a tip to comment on this thread. We have been working hard for the last months to get all our servers up and running in Canada and we finally went live two weeks ago. Go check us out and feel free to reach out with any questions you may have. Our contact info is on the website.
Our organization purchased a license with Survey Select (https://selectsurvey.net/). I've used it a bunch of times and it seems very powerful but not user friendly (very complicated UI/UX).
I recommend reaching out to other health organizations within Canada as they often collect survey data internally. For example, surveys get used for feedback for presentations/educational sessions all the time. With the exception of Alberta, all provinces have separate health authorities which would mean separate contracts/sales cycles etc, however they are usually of large size so it would be worth it financially.
Azure has had two Canadian data centers for half a year now if I'm not mistaken, so it's not like companies didn't have options, not even counting small Canadian providers that I'm sure also have offerings for people who need them.
Actually, when I worked at MS, one of the main reasons for slow Azure adoption in Canada was the lack of a datacenter in the country - IBM had one before Azure and almost all major bank providers had contracts with IBM.
However, in the last year, almost all major banks have moved to Azure and from what I've heard - a lot of companies don't mind it as much, but employees wanted to use AWS (familiarity I guess).
That said, MS has been on a hiring spree for TSPs and TAMs to expand as much as possible so it'll be fun to see what Amazon does to compete.
It almost certainly goes through the US no matter what you do. Traffic going anywhere out of my city first drops down to a big peer exchange in the US, then back up into Canada.
That's odd. I know traceroutes don't always show the truth, but when I was there I could route between Victoria and Vancouver without going through the US, at least. No idea about Vancouver to Montreal.
IT Manager in the Canadian Government here. There is indeed a requirement stating that data must not cross the border. This requirement though depends on the department and level of information security.
Whether or not AWS, Azure, etc. can meet this...I honestly don't know.
Yes, for government entities, but the rest of the comments here are talking about businesses, which are going to be the primary consumers of AWS in Canada. There's probably many more requirements that would be needed to be met for any cloud provider to be used for governments.
I don't believe any provinces have requirements on border crossing, and there's no federal requirement on data sovereignty at all for private corporations.
It would be virtually impossible to comply with the never crossing the border as part of a fast link even if you hosted your own data unless you controlled every part of the link.
I was in a territory (not a province) and we owned every meter of fiber in two territories.
I can assure you the data we were sending around didn't even leave our territory, let alone the country, seeings we owned every single scrap of networking hardware in a ~10,000km radius.
DigitalOcean also has a DC in Canada, this is really useful for companies in Canada or doing business in Canada that have requirements around keeping Canadian customer data in Canada. Additionally the Canadian startup ecosystem seems to be doing pretty well relatively to other regions.
Data Locality is going to continue to be a strong driver for cloud providers getting a presence in different countries.
It feels like it's post-Snowden (but it may be I wasn't paying enough attention before then), but more and more countries have been passing data locality laws and are less willing to have their data residing in the US.
Well, in theory, US companies could still leak user data out, but the consequences are dire if Canada (or whoever) finds out. On the other hand, if Canadian user data is stored in AWS US East for example, then Canada can do absolutely nothing from a legal standpoint.
If the US government did demand data stored in Canada from a US company in contravention of Canadian law, wouldn't they just include a gag order so the US company can't tell their customer about it? And since the vast majority of the US company's assets and operations are in the US, they wouldn't dare stand up to the US government.
Not sure why you were down voted, I was born and raised in Montreal and was also surprised by this, especially given that the US regions seem to refer to time zones. I am guessing it's possibly for marketing reasons, calling it "central" might help get more customers both in the east and west. Calling it "east" could mean anything from Toronto to the maritimes.
Growing up in Alberta, people often referred to Ontario/QC as "out east" and "down east." My brother still does that. And many people there seem unable to make a proper distinction between eastern and central Canada economically or politically too.
In my experience, Ontario and Quebec are colloquially referred to as "Out East" or "Eastern Provinces" while the Atlantic provinces are referred to more often as "The Maritimes" or the "East Coast".
Looking at a map, I guess I can see Ontario being close to central Canada (along with Manitoba and Saskatchewan), but Quebec is definitely almost as East as it gets, and since the data centre is in Montreal...
Ontario/Quebec are definitely commonly called "East" out here in Vancouver. The Maritimes are, well, the Maritimes. Central usually means the prairies.
You say that so definitively. Like anyone is stupid to even question it. But the Central Canada thing is merely a historical artifact and has no real basis in, well you know, actual geographic location.
Quebec actually extends farther east than all other provinces (except Newfoundland). In other words, it's farther east than 3 out 4 so called "Atlantic" or "Eastern" provinces.
It's a mix of geography, demographics, and history. But I say it definitivly because it's not just something I've made up or decided... it's a pretty well known designation.
I wonder how they are coming up with the region names? Most are cities (Sao Paolo, Frankfurt), some are countries (Ireland), some regions (N. Virginia, Oregon).
This new region is unique in that is does not refer to an actual place, and that the name alone is not descriptive (in the AWS console, it says just "Central" in the header).
I live in Montreal and the local authorities have already begun maple syrup rationing due to the new data centre. I'm only permitted one litre per month. People are starting to riot.
I'm in Montreal. If I understand, most of the speed boost I might feel will be EC2 instances and CloudFront stuff. Will it have any effect on S3's latency ?
As far as I understand, it will have a positive effect on S3's latency, for straightforward reasons. But to what extent? Maybe some BOE calculations might help... Throwing out a guess, the gains probably won't be too extreme.
EDIT: Of course this is dependent on what region you're currently in!
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.
Ha, yes, I know. The reference to Vermont was more relevant.
I actually chose Washington state intentionally over North Dakota since its mild climate made for a more striking comparison. Factually correct, but perhaps a bit misleading.
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.
