Latency Between AWS Global Regions

I was wondering the accurate latency between all AWS global regions, so I did this test.

Please note this test does not include China (Beijing) | cn-north-1 because it is a complete isolated region with separate domains and account system.

I used some bash script to make launching/terminating instances across regions easier.

Setup

Instances in all regions were c4.large running the lastest Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS (Xenial) except South America (São Paulo):

• c3.large was used because c4.large was not supported yet
• Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS (Trusty) was used because I got Kernal panic booting Ubuntu 16.04

All ping tests were done by:

ping -c 60 [host]

Results

US East (N. Virginia) | us-east-1

US West (N. California) | us-west-1

US West (Oregon) | us-west-2

EU (Ireland) | eu-west-1

EU (Frankfurt) | eu-central-1

Asia Pacific (Tokyo) | ap-northeast-1

Asia Pacific (Seoul) | ap-northeast-2

Asia Pacific (Singapore) | ap-southeast-1

Asia Pacific (Sydney) | ap-southeast-2

South America (São Paulo) | sa-east-1

Conclusions

As you can see, the latency between different AWS regions are quite steady. The jitter is below 1ms most of the time. I think it’s because there are private AWS fiber links interconnect all major regions.

Another thing I noticed is that globally speaking, US East (N. Virginia) | us-east-1 has the BEST average latency to the world in all 10 AWS regions. So if your start small and think big, us-east-1 is probably the No.1 choice to start with.