Why do we opt for AWS Mumbai Region as an Indian cloud customer?

Overview

Are you an Indian AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud Customer? Do you want to adopt AWS Mumbai Region for your production?

Then we have an analysis for you that will help you to decide whether to go for AWS Mumbai Region or not. In this blog, we’ll look at aspects like “cost comparison, services availability, S3 object download speed test, latency check, compliance” between near and famous regions.

For those who are not familiar with AWS, a region in AWS is a term that describes a set of AWS resources within a geographic area. Each region contains multiple, isolated locations called Availability Zones (AZ). In June 2016, AWS announced

Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region as 13^th AWS Region. Now, AWS provides 35 AZs across 13 regions globally.

There are more than 75,000 India-based customers who are already using other AWS Regions to save costs, accelerate innovation, and widen their geographic reach in minutes.

What does Mumbai region mean to all the hitherto existing customers or new customer?

Mumbai Region allows global and India-based developers, start-ups, enterprises, government organisations and non-profits to leverage the AWS Cloud to run their applications from India and provide even lower latency to India-based end users. Two separate Availability Zones are offered by new AWS Mumbai Region. As an add-on, India has got a new Edge location in New Delhi, for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. Delhi is third edge location in India (including Mumbai and Chennai).

Why do you need to choose Mumbai region as an Indian organization?

Price comparison between different regions

We made a comparison of AWS services (eg – EC2) in different AWS Regions in terms of pricing. The pricing of EC2 in North Virginia is cheap compared to Singapore, Tokyo and Mumbai.

Although North Virginia is considered as the cheapest region, Mumbai region will definitely attract Indian and nearby customers to choose this region as their preference. Mumbai is cheaper compared to Singapore and Tokyo regions in terms of pricing and network latency is also less. Before the arrival of Mumbai region, Singapore was considered as the nearest and Tokyo was nearest expensive region.

S3 object download speed test

As a part of testing download speed of S3, we launched an Amazon EC2 in Mumbai Region and created four S3 buckets in different Regions such as Mumbai, N.Virginia, Singapore, Tokyo. Uploaded a file of 10 Mb in each bucket,and downloaded the same in EC2, we could notice that Mumbai took very less time with high data transfer rate compared to other regions like N.Virginia, Singapore and Tokyo.

Network performance between regions

Checking the network performance between EC2 instance and local machine from India, we have following results as the amount of data transferred, the bandwidth achieved and other parameters: –

We found that Mumbai is having the highest rate of data transfer from India, the next followed by Singapore, Tokyo and lastly North Virginia.

North Virginia, being the cheapest region globally also has the lowest data transfer rate from India. This comparison itself talks about the impact of having an AWS region in Mumbai for Indian organisations while confirming that Mumbai region is the cheapest and has highest data transfer rate compared to other Asia Pacific Regions (like Singapore, Tokyo).

Compliance

Every AWS region, Mumbai region is also designed and built to meet rigorous compliance standards including ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 1, SOC 2, and PCI DSS Level 1 (to name a few). AWS implements an Information Security Management System (ISMS) that is independently assessed by qualified third parties. These assessments address a wide variety of requirements which are communicated to customers by making certifications and audit reports available, either on our public-facing website or upon request.

Mumbai region offers Dedicated Hosts, Placement Groups for EC2, and an Endpoint for VPC. Dedicated hosts allow you to place your instances on a specific, physical server and view your instance configurations in real-time. Using placement groups with supported instance types enables applications to participate in a low-latency, 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) network. The endpoint of VPC enables you to create a private connection between your VPC and another AWS service without requiring access to the Internet, through a NAT device, a VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect.

Which types of customers will be served?

AWS Mumbai Region will attract mostly e-commerce customers who have requirements of mainly EC2, RDS, Route 53, and S3. Mumbai Region will help them in scaling up and down according to requirements.

Any web application having the major customer base from India as well as other Asia-Pacific countries. In that case, websites can be hosted in Mumbai Region and can use CloudFront for delivering content faster to other Asia Pacific countries.

Services not available in Mumbai region

Mumbai Region will not be suitable now for a MNCs who is looking for AWS Directory Service to manage their existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory (AD Connector), or to setup and operate a new directory in AWS cloud for accessing AWS management Console and AWS applications, such as Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon WorkDocs, using their existing credentials. They have to wait for few more time.

If a customer is planning to opt Mumbai region for private Git which is served by AWS CodeCommit then it is not recommended for now.

Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) allows you to easily run and manage Docker-enabled applications across a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances, but unfortunately, it is not available now here.

Mobile application developers will not leverage Mobile Hub Service for now, which is an integrated console that helps you create, build, test, and monitor mobile apps that leverage AWS services. Just select features you want and AWS Mobile Hub provisions and configures AWS resources on your behalf.

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