Key detail here: "You will need to create an AWS account that is specific to the Region."

Be a completely isolated region by the sound. My question, will this open up that region to more external developers?

Probably partially due to a different Terms of Services being required for a Chinese account, such as "Local government agencies will have 24/7 full access to your data, and they can shut down your server for any reasons without prior notices", etc.

How it's different from same implicit Terms for accounts in USA?

Perhaps in China agency needs court order? :-)

Another stupid NSA comment. Well, since you made the joke... I would bet that it is legally easier for the Chinese govt to get to your data, and they might be willing to share some of it with our govt for the right favors.

I'm not arguing that it's easier or harder for the Chinese government to get your data in China than it is for GCHQ to get your data in Britain. I'm only pointing out that they are less likely to give all that data to the NSA.

This could be important if you care about which government is reading your data.

Yeah, sure if you want to believe that. Let's hope the bad guys are that dumb, it'll make them easier to catch. We should just outsource the NSA to China so people feel safer, and it will cost less money.

It's more because any TOS will have to be written in Chinese and take into account Chinese law. You can't use an English TOS or just translate a foreign one. For a developing country, the Chinese legal system is actually very good. The problem most people run into with it is they assume they can just get away with standard boilerplate agreements like they do in other countries -- these are never valid in China.

> This Region will allow China-based and multinational companies to make use of a broad collection of AWS services while remaining in compliance with China's legal and regulatory requirements

It'll be interesting to see how that works out in practice.

From my previous encounters with China related requirements their main policy seems to be 'our data never leaves the country.'

It's an interestingly prescient decision with the Snowden revelations as a backdrop.

If that was really the original motivation for China's policies then Amazon's US ties could spell trouble in the long run though.

Now I can finally launch my online backup service which stores each piece of customer data as a random number in the US, and an XOR of that random number and the actual data in China.

I don't blame the guy there's money to be made from hosting in China as well.

But i suspect this will end up being an isolated island in their system limited to the Chinese market only.

> limited to the Chinese market only

yeah, limited to $9 Trillion, 9% growth Chinese market and the economies that sell into it such as anyone in the entire world.

Any ideas on cost? As an example, the Tokyo region is much more expensive for EC2.

"while remaining in compliance with China's legal and regulatory requirements." It could mean Chinese Government will start blocking main AWS services outside of China to avoid noncompliance's just like what it did with Google search.

Very interesting.. But I can't see it being much use for foreign developers unless they make getting an ICP license easier.

Kindle does not sell well in China, AWS as well