AWS Cloud Expands Into China, C3 Instances Sell Out 

The Amazon Web Services subsidiary of the online retailing giant is expanding its cloud into China, one of the more difficult markets for any IT vendor to crack.

China skipped from landlines directly to cell phones, and it is a bit of a wonder that it did not jump from a relative scarcity of IT infrastructure to shared cloud-style capacity. The IT build-out in China has been the growth driver for the IT market for the past decade, and it has been mostly for in-house gear or hyperscale datacenter operators like Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba who have not, as yet, decided to start up their own cloud compute services as Amazon has done. (Some of them have data storage services, however, aimed at consumers.)

In a statement, Amazon said that thousands of customers in China have been using capacity in eight of its nine other regions, which are located in the United States, Ireland, Brazil, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney, and now they would be able to get something more local and therefore with lower latencies and in Chinese instead of another language. (Corporate customers, including those in China, are not eligible to use the ninth region, which is the GovCloud located in Oregon that AWS has set up explicitly to run applications on behalf of state and federal government agencies in the United States.)

The new China region will be established in Beijing, and Amazon says that many of the social gaming, mobile, biotech, and security application providers will be participating in the limited preview in the services hosted from Beijing starting in early 2014. Amazon has also inked a deal with the Ningxia Hui nationality autonomous region in northwest China to put a public cloud facility there. The Ningxia government will turn around and use the cloud to run applications. The Shanghai Jiading Industrial Zone is also going to provide incentives to Chinese companies through an incubation program to help them automate on the cloud.

As EnterpriseTech goes to press, Amazon has not yet responded to requests for more information about the China region facility and what kinds of controls, if any, the Chinese government has put in place. All that Amazon has said in its statement announcing the region is that it will "will allow China-based and multinational companies to make use of a broad collection of AWS services while remaining in compliance with China's legal and regulatory requirements."

Like Microsoft, Amazon is partnering with local companies to house its cloud and provide it bandwidth. In this case, Amazon has chosen China Net Center and SINNET to provide the infrastructure, network services, and CDN services behind the China region. It is not clear if Amazon is putting its homegrown servers and storage into the facility.

Customers have to create an account on AWS that is specific to the China region to use it, by the way. The limited preview includes the core EC2 compute, EBS and S3 storage, and RDS and DynamoDB data services. Virtual Private Cloud, Elastic MapReduce, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, and the necessary queuing, messaging, load balancing, access control, and caching services are also being offered in the China region, as will premium support staffed by Amazon from Beijing.

Microsoft opened up a China region for it Windows Azure cloud back in May 2013, and inked a deal with the municipality of Shanghai to put the region there. As a condition of the deal, Shanghai required Microsoft to find a local hosting partner for its Azure wares and let them, rather than Microsoft, run the infrastructure. 21Vianet was the Chinese company that got the deal, and Microsoft is providing tech support for Azure as it runs in 21Vianet's datacenters.

Clouds have not really taken off in China yet, but a report from Forrester cited by Microsoft as it launched its Shanghai region for Azure projected that the public cloud market will grow from $297 million in 2011 to $3.8 billion by 2020. It is still early days, so Amazon is not late.

Censorship and control issues with the Chinese government compelled Google to move its search engine from China to Hong Kong nearly four years ago, and it seems unlikely that Google will try to get its Compute Engine infrastructure cloud and Application Engine platform cloud services into China any time soon. Unless, of course, Google can come to an accommodation with the Chinese government.

In a separate development, those new C3 fat and fast instances that debuted in mid-November are oversubscribed, much to the surprise of Amazon and demonstrating that even cloud companies with massive infrastructure and predictive capacity planning have trouble predicting and meeting demand.

Amazon did not supply any numbers, but in a blog post said that usage on the C3 instances, which have fast CPUs, large memory configurations, fat solid state disks for storage, and faster networking (presumed to be dual 10 Gb/sec Ethernet, but Amazon is not saying), was higher than expected. In fact, AWS took a look back in the capacity history books and found that it took only two weeks to burn through the capacity that the fastest-growing instance type (which it did not divulge) took to burn through in 22 weeks. "This is why some of you are not getting the C3 capacity you're asking for when you request it," explained Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS, in the post. Six regions – US West, US East, Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney – are offering the C3 instances at the moment. Well, when they can.