[yibers]

Ass covering-wise, you are probably better off going down with everyone else on us-east-1. The not so fun alternative: being targeted during an RCA explaining why you chose some random zone no one ever heard of.

[rconti]

Places nobody's ever heard of like "Ohio" or "Oregon"?

Yeah, I'm not worried about being targeted in an RCA and pointedly asked why I chose a region with way better uptime than `us-tirefire-1`.

What _is_ worth considering is whether your more carefully considered region will perform better during an actual outage where some critical AWS resource goes down in Virginia, taking my region with it anyway.

[xingped]

IIRC, some AWS services are solely deployed on and/or entirely dependent on us-east-1. I don't recall which ones, but I very distinctly remember this coming up once.

[kristianc]

I find it funny that we see complaints about why software quality has got worse alongside people advocating to choose objectively risky AWS regions for career risk and blame minimisation reasons.

[goalieca]

This was always the case. The OG saying was “no one got fired for buying IBM”. Then it was changed to Microsoft. And so on..

[throwawaysleep]

They are for the same reason. How do customers react to either? If us-east-1 fails, nobody complains. If Microsoft uses a browser to render components on Windows and eats all of your RAM, nobody complains.

[jordanb]

Istr major resource unavailability in US-East-2 during one of the big US-East-1 outages because people were trying to fail over. Then a week later there was a US-East-2 outage that didn't make the news.

So if you tried to be "smart" and set up in Ohio you got crushed by the thundering herd coming out of Virginia and then bit again because aws barely cares about you region and neither does anyone else.

The truth is Amazon doesn't have any real backup for Virginia. They don't have the capacity anywhere else and the whole geographic distribution scheme is a chimera.

[Fhch6HQ]

This is an interesting point. As recently as mid-2023 us-east-2 was 3 campuses with a 5 building design capacity at each. I know they've expanded by multiples since, but us-east-1 would still dwarf them.

Makes one wonder, does us-west-2 have the capacity to take on this surge?

[nothrabannosir]

> being targeted during an RCA explaining why you chose some random zone no one ever heard of.

“Duh, because there’s an AZ in us-east-1 where you can’t configure EBS volumes for attachment to fargate launch type ECS tasks, of course. Everybody knows that…”

:p

[riffic]

how about following the well-architected framework and building something with a suitable level of 9s where you can justify your decisions during a blameless postmortem (please stamp your buzzword bingo card for a prize.)

[paradox460]

We vibe code everything in flavor of the month node frameworks, tyvm, because elixir is too hard to hire for (or some equally inane excuse)

[g947o]

> explaining why you chose some random zone no one ever heard of

Is this from real experience of something that actually happened, or just imagined?

The only things that matter in a decision are:

* Services that are available in the region

* (if relevant and critical) Latency to other services

* SLAs for the region

Everything else is irrelevant.

If you think AWS is so bad that their SLAs are not trustworthy, that's a different problem to solve.

[throwawaysleep]

This to me was the real lesson of the outage. A us-east-1 outage is treated like bad weather. A regional outage can be blamed on the dev. us-east-1 is too big to get blamed, which is why it should be the region of choice for an employee.

[Esophagus4]

Bizarre way of making decisions.

us-east-2 is objectively a better region to pick if you want US east, yet you feel safer picking use1 because “I’m safer making a worse decision that everyone understands is worse, as long as everyone else does it as well.”

[dontdoxxme]

Why aren't you using IBM cloud?

[thejosh]

Bandwidth cost is also another major reason.