Speed and latency between AWS Sydney and other regions

Since the launch of the AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2) region in November 2012 the majority of my infrastructure has been placed here.

There are however times where infrastructure or services need to exist in other regions whether that be for DR or even to bring an application closer to end users. Sometimes these applications need to be replicated either synchronously or asynchronously.

For one such application I needed a secondary region with the fastest transfer speeds and lowest latency and as such I needed to run a few tests.

To perform these tests I created instances in each availability zone and ran three tests:

1. ICMP latency in ms averaged over 100 packets.
2. Data transfer from Sydney to the region region measured by transferring a 1GB file and taking the average transfer rate.
3. Data transfer from the remote region to Sydney measured by transferring that same 1GB file and taking the average transfer rate.

The results of these tests are as follows.

Latency from AWS Sydney

Speed from AWS Sydney

Conclusion

By looking at this we can see that ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo) has the highest data transfer speed at 14.3MBs/ (average in and out). It also has the lowest latency at 105ms.

If an American region is preferred we can see that us-west-1 (Northern California) has the highest speed in this area at 9.425MB/s (average in and out) with the lowest latency of 158ms. Of course cost is almost always a consideration and we can see that us-west-2 (Oregon) is close but with the benefit of lower pricing.