Amsterdam Data Centre

[Eireannach]

In his latest blogpost at http://blog.fastmail.com/2015/05/21/...-kolab-summit/ brongondwana mentions a new datacenter in Amsterdam.

I felt I had to close my Fastmail account recently as it was proving too difficult to keep business/personal seperate and I therefore had problems with EU dataprotection rules around transferring data outside the EU.

Is there any possibility that EU based Fastmail users might get the option of having all their data stored in the Amsterdam centre so as to avoid this problem ?

[BritTim]

That is a really interesting blog post. The Roundcube news is potentially huge. The planned extensive use of JMAP is a vote of confidence in this exciting new protocol. Assuming the Roundcube project is successful (and I expect it to be) it will really raise Fastmail's profile.

[robn]

Originally Posted by Eireannach

Is there any possibility that EU based Fastmail users might get the option of having all their data stored in the Amsterdam centre so as to avoid this problem ?

Its planned, but we haven't decided on the details yet.

Right now Amsterdam has a complete copy of all mail data but no other services (we have two large mail store servers there but no other hardware). We're in the process of shutting down our Iceland datacentre and moving the hardware to Amsterdam and sourcing other hardware.

Once we've got capacity to run production user load from Amsterdam, we'll start to work out exactly what running user service from there looks like.

My expectation is that the first step will be to give users a "master" datacentre, which has two mail replicas and does the bulk of the web and delivery work for that user. The opposite datacentre (New York or Amsterdam) will have one replica as the off-site backup, and be able to handle web and delivery in the event of a datacentre loss.

So obviously there's still at least one replica in New York, even for users mastered in Amsterdam. We can trivially remove that replica but then there's no off-site redundancy, so we're not likely to want to do that until we have some other off-site redundancy available.

There's also backups to consider and also we need to look at how non-mail data like account and billing information is stored. Right now our entire system assumes that that information is always available everywhere, which we do with MySQL replication across datacentres. If we decided to split it in some way we'd need to do a lot of work to make sure that things knew when they needed to go to another datacentre for information. We'd also need to gain a good understanding of exactly what the EU data protection rules actually require. Can we even query the EU database from the US? Can we keep in-memory caches of data? Do the rules apply to all data, or only user-generated content, or what else?

So as you can see, there's a lot of steps between where we are now and what you want (compliance with EU data protection rules). But we want to try and offer something, so we're heading in that direction. Realistically its at least a year or two away from that final stage, if we can get there at all.

[Eireannach]

Thank you robn for your detailed response and for dealing with it straight on. I am impressed .

[digp]

Switzerland instead of Amsterdam would be better

[danieldk]

Originally Posted by digp

Switzerland instead of Amsterdam would be better

For whom? If you have to comply with EU data protection laws, it doesn't help, since Switzerland is not part of the EU. Also, since Amsterdam hosts a large internet exchange, bandwidth is probably a lot cheaper.