AWS launched the Israeli region (API Code: il-center-1) in August 2023. The region was launched with three availability zones and 65 AWS services on the launch date. I received many inquiries from customers and decided to share a price comparison I made:
I have compared the pricing with the following regions:
USA:
- North Virginia (API code: us-east-1)
Europe:
- Ireland (API code: eu-west-1)
- Zurich (API code: eu-central-2)
Oceania:
- Sydney (API code: ap-southeast-2)
The comparison with the US (North Virginia) and EU (Ireland) regions is because these are the flagship regions in each continent and provide the base price.
Zurich (Switzerland) has similar economic characteristics, and Sydney (Australia) is an island country like Israel (Israel’s imports arrive by air and sea, and it is an energy island).
The comparison includes AWS most used services:
- AWS S3 (Storage) — Storing Data in the standard storage class.
- Data Transfer.
- AWS EC2 (Compute) — Instance with no licensing costs.
- AWS RDS (Databases) — Aurora standard database.
I chose the most common components in each service and compared the cost per unit, EC2 and RDS — cost per hour. In S3 and Data transfer, cost per Gigabyte:
| Service | Metric | US East (N. Virginia) | Europe (Ireland) | Europe (Zurich) | Asia Pacific (Sydney) | Israel (Tel Aviv) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S3 | S3 standard storage class, hourly per GB price | $0.02300 | $0.02300 | $0.02695 | $0.02500 | $0.02500 |
| S3 | Price difference, US East is 100% | — | 0.00% | 17.17% | 8.70% | 8.70% |
| Data transfer | Data transfer out to the internet, price per GB | $0.0900 | $0.0900 | $0.0900 | $0.1140 | $0.1100 |
| Data transfer | Price difference | — | 0.00% | 0.00% | 26.67% | 22.22% |
| Data transfer | Data transfer to a region in another continent, price per GB | $0.0200 | $0.0200 | $0.0200 | $0.0980 | $0.0800 |
| Data transfer | Price difference | — | 0.00% | 0.00% | 490.00% | 400.00% |
| EC2 | EC2 c5.large instance cost | $0.0850 | $0.0960 | $0.1070 | $0.1110 | $0.1010 |
| EC2 | Price difference | — | 12.94% | 25.88% | 30.59% | 18.82% |
| EC2 | EC2 m6g.xlarge instance cost | $0.1540 | $0.1720 | $0.2024 | $0.1920 | $0.1806 |
| EC2 | Price difference | — | 11.69% | 31.43% | 24.68% | 17.27% |
| EC2 | EBS snapshots | $0.0500 | $0.0500 | $0.0590 | $0.0550 | $0.0600 |
| EC2 | Price difference | — | 0.00% | 18.00% | 10.00% | 20.00% |
| EC2 | EBS GP3 storage cost | $0.0800 | $0.0880 | $0.1142 | $0.0960 | $0.1056 |
| EC2 | Price difference | — | 10.00% | 42.75% | 20.00% | 32.00% |
| RDS | RDS db.t3.medium | $0.0820 | $0.0880 | $0.1060 | $0.1250 | $0.0920 |
| RDS | Price difference | — | 7.32% | 29.27% | 52.44% | 12.20% |
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Conclusion
When I review the results, the Israeli region is priced relatively similarly to Zurich and Sydney while in certain services, the region in Tel Aviv has a price advantage (S3 for example).
I want to draw the readers’ attention to the “data transfer to a region in another continent” cost.
The results are surprising. Transferring data from the region in Israel to any other region will cost four times more than transferring data from US or EU regions.
This has a significant impact since many companies back up their data to a remote location.
Bonus section
At the time of writing this comparison, there are 14 EC2 instance families (c5, c5d, c6g, i3, i3en, m5, m5d, m6g, m6gd, r5, r5d, r6g, t3, t4g), and 118 instance types that are available in regions I’m comparing.
When you see the data on the graph, you can see that the region in Israel is 5–6 percent more expensive compared to Ireland. While the price differences in Switzerland and Australia differ depending on the instance family.
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