All Internet traffic in and out of Israel goes through three undersea cables connecting the country with Turkey, Greece, and Italy, and as such suffer from the kind of lag that happens when you're separated from your destination server by a couple thousand kilometers, usually more. There are no local cloud providers and the local entrepreneurial culture (which is MASSIVE for such a small country) either has to pay for cloud resources in Europe or has to pay for local non-cloud hosting, which is orders of magnitude more expensive and running on relatively ancient hardware (the local VPS shops have little incentive to upgrade).
Amazon will come to Israel if they deem it profitable. They aren't exactly Google Fiber though, so I think they would avoid locating themselves in areas with poor connectivity options in the first place.
Not really, from AWS perspective it's about locating regions close to potential customers with $$$ and a desire for a local region. That desire might be due to regulatory requirements or poor connectivity to other regions.
To figure out where the next AWS regions are going, go down the wikipedia list of countries by GDP and try to think which large markets are not well served yet:
In the Middle East there are several markets larger than Israel, and putting a region in Israel will probably not be tenable for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the like.
There is no region in Africa...
Russia & Eastern Europe is not that well served...
But most of the Middle East and Africa aren't wired up well enough to begin with let alone have strong entrepreneurial cultures to push for local cloud adoption. Israel has a booming startup culture, they just all must use European clouds if they decide to go with a cloud infrastructure (and the vast majority of them do).
Fast connections there are also few and far between in the Middle East and Africa. In Israel, LTE is ubiquitous in urban areas, most residences have either DOCSIS 3.0 or Fiber-to-the-curb, and a nationwide FTTH infrastructure is being built out currently. Domestic connections are great - the problem is just that almost nothing is hosted domestically.
Eastern Europe / Western Russia sounds like a good idea to me, although I'm not familiar with their local Internet topologies.
Nothing in NZ either, 2500KM minimum for our data to go to get to any of the large cloud service providers in Sydney. Worth the lag though for the cost savings.
All Internet traffic in and out of Israel goes through three undersea cables connecting the country with Turkey, Greece, and Italy, and as such suffer from the kind of lag that happens when you're separated from your destination server by a couple thousand kilometers, usually more. There are no local cloud providers and the local entrepreneurial culture (which is MASSIVE for such a small country) either has to pay for cloud resources in Europe or has to pay for local non-cloud hosting, which is orders of magnitude more expensive and running on relatively ancient hardware (the local VPS shops have little incentive to upgrade).
Do we have to beg for Amazon to come here?!