I'm in Melbourne notice the round trip time from my browser to Sydney Amazon Servers 30ms

You can test this by finding a ping-able IP address in the cloud you are using to host your VM and compare with one from the another location

http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ <= This has a lot of IPs for AWS

Here is an example of ping times for my Digital Ocean webserver in Singapore in comparison to AWS in Sydney note the 24.1ms vs ~400ms