[thinkingkong]

There are so many outages in us-east-1. I've heard the reason is because that's where they roll out maintenance first or something along those lines. Just look at this list of outages on Wikipedia [1] and scan for US-east-1, North Virginia, or "Northeast" (all the same places).

Just don't use US-EAST-1 as your region.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...

[discodave]

It's the oldest region, which means:

* It's the largest region (ever had an unexpected scaling bug?).

* It has more legacy stuff lying around. For example, old regions have EC2 Classic, while new regions are VPC only.

* There are more customers there. More whales, more use cases.

Most AWS teams explicitly try not to deploy to us-east-1 first, but because us-east-1 is so different on so many dimensions, it is more likely to have issues that dont manifest elsewhere.

(Source: An AWS Engineer)

[Johnny555]

I've heard the reason is because that's where they roll out maintenance first

That doesn't make sense - why would they do maintenance in their largest (and oldest) region first? I'd expect them to roll out changes to smaller regions first so problems will affect fewer users.

I think the more likely explanation is that it's their largest (and oldest) region.

[swasheck]

an aws tam once told me the same thing. us-east-1a gets the new stuff first. i never validated it against anything other than this one person's statement.

[ecnahc515]

"1a" in this context means nothing. The AZ assignments each account gets is random. us-east-1a is probably a different data center for you than me.

[empath75]

It’s also full of legacy infrastructure since it was the first region.

[chocolatkey]

It is usually the cheapest region though. Maybe this is why

[jermops]

Source? I see price parity across us-east-* and us-west-2 for every service i've looked at.

[karavelov]

It's the biggest region, if it breaks it breaks in us-east-1.

[teej]

Redshift changes roll out in us-east-1 after other regions though, so I imagine the root cause is something else.