Yes
Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
#42Ass 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.
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 Am…
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?
Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
#43I 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.
That's an interesting data point, but I don't think it's relevant. The datacenters themselves are designed with a high level of power reliability and can island themselves if needed.
We've started to see some rather interesting consequences for grid reliability: https://blog.gridstatus.io/byte-blackouts-large-data-center-...
Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Oh, people complain. The companies responsible have just gotten to the point where they are so entrenched that they don't need to care at all about customer complaints.
Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
IAM
Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh, people complain. The companies responsible have just gotten to the point where they are so entrenched that they don't need to care at all about customer complaints.
It all sticks with the 'monopoly' scent.
Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh, people complain. The companies responsible have just gotten to the point where they are so entrenched that they don't need to care at all about customer complaints.
The value now is not really money from customers, but a company's share price or valuation. That, together with the hard push for subscriptions from every single app and service, devaluated customer experience and feedback. Because not many will go through the hell of unsubscribing process even after the outage or serious issues like private data stolen.
There's just not much motivation left to do better systems.
Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Everything new basically, like the AI services.
Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
#49The test environment is deployed on us-east-1, whereas the production environment deployed on us-west-2 on our side.
Re: Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
#50Us-east-1 is far far from least reliable. It’s one of the more reliable ones. Smaller regions tend to have more reliability issues affecting the entire AZ.
This analysis is skewed due to the major incident in 2025. What was the data for 2024 and over the last, say, 5 years? So the proclamation of least reliable of us-east-1 is based on 1 year of data, and it’s probably fair to say that at least last 3 years if not 5 are a better predictor of reliability.
us-east-1 also hosts some special things, so it will have more services to lose.