Latency of requesting a object from S3 to EC2

Question

What's the latency to GET an object from S3 from an EC2 Instance.

For example, how many ms before the actual data stream for that object starts streaming back when requesting a object by it's full path.

• If the object exists on S3
• If the object does not exist and to send a 404

Latency, not Throughput.

Answer 1

I don't think AWS makes guarantees about latency, but using S3 from EC2 is definitely going to be faster than doing it over the web. If you want to get an idea of how well S3 performs in practice, check out http://www.cloudstatus.com/. Unfortunately, that site only gives throughput statistics, but I figure you may be interested in that anyway. You may also be interested in their availability guarantee: http://aws.amazon.com/s3-sla/

Answer 2

We are providing monitoring data for HTTP requests to S3 on our website:

http://www.cloudclimate.com/s3/

Answer 3

We usually experience latency of around 200-300ms from EC2 to S3. It's much slower than you might expect.