amazon web services performance

Question

I'm from Canada. I'm building a web app with node js and mongoDB. I am very interested by AWS for 2 reasons: the scalable feature and the s3 service. The users of my app will upload a lot of photos and s3 look perfect for my project. At this time, the cloud server regions available on AWS Marketplace are:

They don't have any cloud server in Canada. You can see where I live (green) on the image. Do you think my physical location will cause some performance issue for my users? AWS are talking about 'availability zone'...if I'm living outside an availability zone (no availability zone in Canada) can I choose my zone for hosting my app?

Answer 1

Do you think my physical location will cause some performance issue for my users?

Not at all. The company I work for has a website dedicated for Canadian users that is run out of the us-east-1 region. We have never had any reports of issues from Canadian users of the site.

AWS are talking about 'availability zone'...if I'm living outside an availability zone (no availability zone in Canada) can I choose my zone for hosting my app?

Availability zones have nothing (directly) to do with your geographic location. Each of Amazons different regions have multiple availability zones. In a nutshell, each availability zone is a physically and electrically isolated datacenter. For example, in the eu-west-1 region there are currently 5 availability zones . What this essentially means is that the eu-west-1 region, which is physically located in Northern Virginia, consists of 5 independent datacenters. A power failure, network issue, etc. that impacts one of those 5 datacenters should have no impact on the other 4 datacenters.

If you were to design a highly fault-tolerant website then Amazon would recommend that you distribute each component of your site across multiple availability zones within the same region, and to ensure that the site can function if all the services in one availability zone were to fail. This is why they provide multiple availability zones in each region.

To answer your specific question, however, you can choose both the region and the availability zone within a region when you launch a server instance. When you launch an instance through the AWS web interface it will default to choosing a random availability zone for you, but you can also pick a specific availability zone if you so desire.

The region you choose will dictate the geographic area where your instance resides (Northern Virginia for us-east-1, Oregon for us-west-2, etc). Depending on the region you choose there will be between 2 and 5 availability zones to choose from.