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Comment by stingraycharles

10 hours ago

It really is failing more, and it’s well known amongst industry experts. It’s the oldest, largest, and most utilized region of AWS.

I’ve heard people say that the underlying physical infrastructure is older, but I think that’s a bit of speculation, although reasonable. The current outage is attributed to a “thermal event”, which does indeed suggest underlying physical hardware.

It’s also the most complex region for AWS themselves, as it’s the “control pad” for many of their global services.

What kind of reputation does ca-central-1 have? I’ve been using it and it seems quietly excellent. Knock on wood.

  • It wasn't heavily utilized when I worked at AWS, until 2024.

    If your customers are clusterrd in Toronto and Montreal, it probably makes a lot of sense to use ca-central-1. If you've got a lot of customers in Western Canada, us-west-2 is gonna have better network latency.

    Other than a couple regions that had problems with their local network infrastructure (sa-east-1 was like that), there's little or nothing to differentiate the regions in terms of physical infrastructure and architecture.

  • Most of the other regions are fairly stable. Ohio (us-east-2) is a great choice if you're just starting out. Not sure about ca-central-1, but I've never heard anything bad about it.