finding best deployment locations in aws regions

Question

Given we are on aws platform we need to subscribe to different sources of data, which are located around the world. How can we efficiently determine what is the region with lowest latency to some target IP (not our browser)?

There is a service called cloudping which pings from your current browser to aws regions, but this cannot be useful for obvious reasons.

Answer 1

You can certainly launch and terminate Amazon EC2 instances all any region you wish. Amazon will not "punish" you -- the system will simply charge the normal cost for resources you use.

If you launch an Amazon EC2 instance with the Amazon Linux AMI, then the instance will be charged per-second, so the cost will be very low. For example, you could use a t2.micro instance for a few cents per hour (charged per second).

You could then run your own timing test from each region. However, you could probably predict the best performance simply based upon the location of the region (US East, US West, Frankfurt, Sydney, etc).