5 Reasons Why You Should Move to the New AWS Hyderabad Region!

Overview

India saw the opening of AWS’s latest region in Hyderabad on November 22, 2022. This is India’s second and Asia Pacific’s tenth AWS cloud region. AWS Hyderabad Region has three Availability Zones and complements the current Mumbai Region, which debuted in June 2016. 

With its proximity to the ever-bustling IT, Healthcare, Education, Manufacturing, Oil & Gas industries, and more in southern India, many companies are investigating migration to this region. Companies might contemplate moving from AWS Mumbai, other hyperscalers, or on-premises to AWS Hyderabad region.  

If you too are an entrepreneur with your base in the AWS Mumbai region contemplating a region change or planning to get started with AWS in India and wondering which location to choose, my blog will help you get started. I have focused on key aspects you should consider while choosing the right region. 

5 Reasons you should move to AWS Hyderabad Region

1. Your customers are closer to the Hyderabad Region

Though the cloud employs virtualization technology, cloud services are still tied to physical servers that reside in physical data centers. Their location will have an impact on the quality of services you deliver. No matter how much bandwidth a data center can access, users are affected by the time the data takes to travel across the internet. Hence, the rule of thumb is to choose a cloud region that is closest to the customers.  

If your customers are in southern India, it is very likely that they are closer to the Hyderabad region. In such a case, you should definitely consider moving to the Hyderabad regions. Although you can use CDN for your content, round-trip distances may incur greater costs as both the request and response have to traverse the distance. 

Latency might not be substantial for certain businesses operating in the south, but it can have a sizeable advantage for southern Media & Entertainment content creators, financial and healthcare organizations, real-time gaming companies, supermarket chains, and so on. Even for organizations in Bangladesh and eastern and north-eastern India, Hyderabad is closer than the Mumbai region and can offer better latency.   

2. Your data centers are closer to the Hyderabad region  

If you have a hybrid setup where you have on-premises datacenter and AWS cloud, there is a lot of benefit in having the datacenter close to your AWS region. Thus, if your data centers are near the Hyderabad region, it’s time for you to make the move. Greater proximity to your data center has its own benefits including low latency, higher bandwidth, and lower AWS Direct Connect costs. 

Due to proximity, the application latency and data transfer between your on-premises and AWS region will be superior giving better performance. This is especially advantageous for you if you are a banking or financial organization and want to store a plethora of data as per compliance.   

3. You require spot instances to optimize costs 

Spot instances are a cost-effective choice that allows you to use space EC2 capacity for less than the on-demand price. These are an ideal choice for businesses that face a lot of changing requirements as they pivot to different projects like data analysis. With spot instances, you can be flexible about when your applications run and whether they can be interrupted.  

As the AWS Hyderabad region is a new one with lesser users, it potentially has tons of unused EC2 capacity. The spot instances are available there at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can run hyper-scale workloads at low cost or accelerate your workloads such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and test & development workloads at the Hyderabad region.  

Moreover, you can easily combine Spot Instances with On-Demand, RIs, and Savings Plans Instances to further optimize workload cost with performance. 

4. You are looking for a Disaster Recovery solution 

Cloud best-practices recommend distributing workloads or creating data backups across multiple cloud regions to ensures high availability and Disaster Recovery (DR). Even if your systems are based in the AWS Mumbai region or any cloud provider, you should create a DR backup of your data in the Hyderabad region.  

Some features, like a Read-Replica in Relational Database Service (RDS) in a different region, takes just a few mins and can give immense value as a DR setup. With it, your data and applications will be highly available and resilient to issues impacting the Mumbai region. You can enjoy high business continuity, limit losses due to data unavailability and revenue reduction, and your customers will have minimum impact on performance efficiency. 

5. You want to set up a separate Dev/Test Region

Cloud best practices recommend a separate dev-test environment, where developers do not have access to production systems. By having separate environments, organizations can create a controlled environment for developers to test their code and make changes without compromising the performance or security of the live system. In turn, this can help minimize the risk of disruptions to business operations and enhance overall system reliability. 

Moreover, separating development and testing from the production environment can facilitate a more efficient development process by enabling multiple teams to work simultaneously on different features without conflicting with one another. This can help accelerate the release of new features and improvements, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience. 

A good way to do this would be to have your dev-test environments in Hyderabad region and keep your production in Mumbai (or vice versa). 

Reasons why you should not move to the AWS Hyderabad region

While I have given you 5 reasons to move below are a few reasons you should choose Mumbai Region instead of Hyderabad.  

1. Your workload and userbase both are closer to the Mumbai region 

Regions allow you to locate your cloud resources closer to your customers. If you are already closer to the region your customers belong to, there is no need to switch to the AWS Hyderabad region. Let’s you are based in Indore and your uses are in Indore itself. In such a case, it makes no sense to shift all your cloud infrastructure to the Hyderabad region. 

In such situations, you can just do a DR in the Hyderabad region to achieve data redundancy. 

2. You are concerned about the service catalog unavailability 

Each AWS Region may offer different service quality in terms of solutions portfolio based on its geographic location and installation period. As Hyderabad is a new region, there are high chances that some important services are not available for customers at the moment. 

As of February 20, 2022, the AWS Hyderabad region doesn’t support the following services: 

• MSK (Kafka) 
• Amazon SageMaker 
• Amazon Inspector 
• Cognito 
• AWS Amplify 
• Elastic Beanstalk 
• AWS Lake Formation 
• AWS Glue 
• Amazon Textract 
• Elastic Transcoder 
• Amazon Transcribe 
• RDS Proxy for MySQL 
• RDS (Custom for Oracle, Custom for SQL Server) 

If any of the above-listed services are non-negotiable for you to set up your cloud infrastructure, you should continue with the AWS Mumbai region until the Hyderabad region becomes fully operational. 

3. Your priority is to cut down on costs 

Pricing varies across different AWS regions due to varying CapEx, OpEx, service catalog items, network performance, latency, and regulatory compliance. Regional data transfers are another aspect to take into account. 

Data transfers are free if you are in the same region or AZ and use a private IP address. However, if you have to transfer data in different regions and availability zones, there are costs associated with it. Hence, if you are at a phase where you are looking to optimize all sorts of costs then AWS Mumbai would be a better choice. 

AWS offers a cost calculator to estimate the expected costs of AWS services in various regions. While analyzing the costs of AWS Mumbai and Hyderabad regions, my team observed that Hyderabad is a tad bit costlier than Mumbai.  

The screenshot here shows the cost comparison for Amazon RDS for MySQL at the two regions. It clearly highlights that the Hyderabad region can cost you an extra fraction of costs for the same service than the Mumbai one.  

If you wish to know how we deduced these costs, click here. 

The takeaway

As the entire world is going cloud, it’s a no-brainer to say that cloud is a requisite for scaling your business today and tomorrow. At such a time, the launch of the Hyderabad region is a great initiative by AWS. The new region will create several growth avenues for our economy as a whole.  

It will particularly benefit industries like banking, BFSI, and manufacturing which has large data security and data residency requirements. Businesses will now have the additional regional infrastructure to deploy applications with even lower latency as well as greater availability and resilience. 

I hope this blog will make it easier for you to decide which AWS region is your best fit. In case you have any questions, please drop a comment below. 

Also, if you wish to know more about cloud migration and its related services, you can reach out to our experts at consulting@cloudthat.com.  

We have been enabling organization scale using the cloud for over a decade. 

About CloudThat

Incepted in 2012 is the first Indian organization to offer Cloud training and consultancy for mid-market and enterprise clients. Our business goal is to provide global services on Cloud Engineering, Cloud Training, and Cloud Expert Line. The expertise in all major cloud platforms including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMware, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) position us as pioneers in the realm.