Comment by Eridrus
10 hours ago
People say this, but this this was just a single AZ, and in the last 3 years of running my startup mostly out of use-1, and we've only had one regional outage, and even that was partial, with most instances uneffected.
And honestly, everybody else's stuff is in use-1, so at least your failures are correlated with your customers lol.
>And honestly, everybody else's stuff is in use-1
Yeah, but why put your eggs in that basket? I moved all our services from east to west/oregon a decade ago and haven't looked back.
Not OP, but I do single-region us-east-1 for a few reasons:
1. The severity and frequency of us-east-1 outages are vastly overstated. It's fine. These us-east-1 outages almost never affect us. This one didn't; not even our instances in the affected AZ. Only that recent IAM outage affected us a little bit, and it affected every other region, too, since IAM's control plane is centrally hosted in us-east-1. Everybody's uptime depends on us-east-1.
2. We're physically close to us-east-1 and have Direct Connect. We're 1 millisecond away from us-east-1. It would be silly to connect to us-east-1 and then take a latency hit and pay cross-region data transfer cost on all traffic to hop over to another region. That would only make sense if we were in both regions, and that is not worth the cost given #1. If we only have a single region, it has to be us-east-1.
3. us-east-1 gets new features first. New AWS features are relevant to us with shocking regularity, and we get it as soon as it's announced.
4. OP is right about the safety in numbers. Our service isn't life-or-death; nobody will die if we're down, so it's just a matter of whether they're upset. When there is a us-east-1 outage, it's headline news and I can link the news report to anyone who asks. That genuinely absolves us every time. When we're down, everybody else is down, too.
90% of customers are located in use-1. Latency to use-1 is more important than being up when everyone else is down.
But it’s okay to be down when the whole internet is down.
none of my stuff is in us-east-1. I chose that specifically 15 years ago. Been a great decision.