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Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?

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Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?

#11
post #3

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.

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.

Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?

#13
post #3

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.

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.

Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?

#15

I intentionally avoid using us-east-1 for anything, since I’ve seen so many outages.

us-east-1 is often a lynchpin for services worldwide. Something hinky happening to dns or dynamodb in us-east-1 will probably wreck your day regardless of where you set up shop.

Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?

#16
I don't know if this is still true, or related, but that area used to be (Circa 10-30 years ago) very highly prone to power outages. The reason was lots of old trees near the lines that would inevitably fall; blackouts in local areas were common due to this.

Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?

#17
post #3

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.

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.

Why aren't you using IBM cloud?

Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why aren't you using IBM cloud?

[deleted]

Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?

#19

Yes, it's the least reliable. Thanks for summarizing the data here to illustrate the issue. It's often seen as the "standard" or "default" region to use when spinning up new US-based AWS services, is the oldest AWS center, has the most interconnected systems, and likely has the highest average load. It makes sense that us-east-1 has reliability problems, but I wish Amazon was a little more upfront about some of the r…

Nobody ever got fired for connecting to us-east-1

Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why aren't you using IBM cloud?

If IBM still had a good reputation, I probably would.
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