Given we are on aws platform we need to subscribe to different sources of data, which are located around the world. How can we efficiently determine what is the region with lowest latency to some target IP (not our browser)?
There is a service called cloudping which pings from your current browser to aws regions, but this cannot be useful for obvious reasons.
Is there any tool similar to cloudping that such that we could specify what ip we want to ping to?
And a secondary question. I suppose it is possible to spawn instances using aws console api, does amazon have some significant fees if i have a script that spawns a compute instance does some short work and terminates it and does this for every single region? Worst case we could spawn instances on all regions for short amount of time and ping to all destinations we are interested but that would be a lot of work for something rather simple... My assumption is that even within one region you might end up with some instances having significantly better latency than others, a script could spawn instances until the best one is found and terminates others...
UPDATE
It seems it rather easy to spawn instances and execute commands in them, shouldnt be hard to terminate them as well. Here is a good tool for this, now the question is will aws punish me with bills and isn't there already solution for this?
You can certainly launch and terminate Amazon EC2 instances all any region you wish. Amazon will not "punish" you -- the system will simply charge the normal cost for resources you use.
If you launch an Amazon EC2 instance with the Amazon Linux AMI, then the instance will be charged per-second, so the cost will be very low. For example, you could use a t2.micro instance for a few cents per hour (charged per second).
You could then run your own timing test from each region. However, you could probably predict the best performance simply based upon the location of the region (US East, US West, Frankfurt, Sydney, etc).
Also, please note that Ping is not a reliable measure for how your actual application would perform. To obtain the best measure, you should run an application in each region that connects to the 'source of data' you are trying to use. Measure performance as it would be used by your actual application. You might find that the remote service has higher latency than the network, meaning that location would only have a minor impact on performance.
If you use somebody else's timing or somebody else's tool, it will not be as accurate as measuring your actual application doing "real" work.