New AWS ca-west-1 (Calgary) region now available

Amazon has finished setting up their second Canadian AWS region. This is big news for anyone in western Canada as regional public cloud coverage has been non-existent, until now. Previously, your only options had been eastern Canada (Montreal) and eastern Canada (Toronto). This is also big news for data sovereignty on AWS. Previously, you didn’t have a option for a Canadian disaster recovery region. AWS only had a single Canadian region (ca-central-1), so your DR site would need to be in another country.

To use this region, you will need to enable the region under your billing dashboard as new regions are not enabled by default. This region has 3 AZs, which would be required if you do proper clustering. For the longest time, the ca-central-1 (Montreal) region only had 2 AZs. I remember getting asked in a job interview how many AZs ca-central-1 had and I correctly answered 2. They were convinced all regions had a minimum of 3 AZs and I got docked points. I am still fuming.

Warning: Advanced technical networking and location ramblings below

The new region has 2 - 100G connections to the Calgary Internet Exchange Point IXP (YYCIX). They terminate at Equinix CL-3 and DataHive. I suspect the first AZ is the standalone AWS datacentre just off of Glenmore east whose location had leaked. The second one is probably located west downtown (just outside of the 100 25 year flood plain) close to DataHive. The DataHive datacentre is tiny so co-locating an entire Amazon AZ is not happening. Downtown Calgary has plenty of cheap office space for a datacentre conversion.

The third AZ is probably co-located at Arrow DC2 south of the airport or eStruxture CAL-2 up past the airport. Co-location would explain why there isn’t a third connection to YYCIX.

As this region is directly connected to YYCIX, this means traffic will not be routing down to the Seattle IXP, unless you yourself are on a local ISP (Shaw) that doesn’t connect to YYCIX yet. I didn’t believe this rumour was still true, but I did some digging and I am not seeing a YYCIX connection registered for Shaw.