[ignoramous]

Poor man's architecture for mitigating outages: Avoid us-east-1 (N Virginia). It unequivocally is the fail-whale of AWS regions. Every service there seems to have abnormally high usage numbers and absurd amount of scale to deal with. As James Hamilton would like to remind us, at such scale, even rare events are frequent [0]. The curse of being the default region, I suppose?

us-east-2 (Ohio) and eu-west-1 (Dublin) are my go-to regions. Prices are the same and most new services (and new features) are almost always ready to go on launch days.

[0] https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/at-scale-rare-even...

[taf2]

I can recall a number of outages on us west 1/2 so not sure the argument applies maybe us east 1 failure is just more visible when it happens... the latest incident didn’t impact all of us east 1 - really just people using kensis right?

[luhn]

No one should use us-west-1 unless they have a good reason to: It's more expensive, only two AZs for new customers, frequent capacity issues, and slow to get new services. us-west-2 should almost always be preferred, as it's a flagship region and only a couple light-milliseconds away.

As a user of us-west-2, I've found it to be very reliable. I can only remember a couple minor issues off the top of my head. The region hasn't even made the leaderboard. [1] ;)

Every time us-east-1 goes haywire, I can kick my feet up and relax as the world burns.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/pes/

[freeone3000]

Well, yes, but services like SNS and S3 use kinesis, so if you used either of those...

[Rapzid]

It's my understanding that they roll out changes there first, historically. New features land there first. Etc. US-EAST-1 IS the canary.

[Matthias247]

This is a repeated wrong statement.

Every AWS service can decide their deployment strategy on their own - there is no mandate on which region gets updates first. And starting in smaller regions is recommended.

[toast0]

If it's the canary, you don't want to be there if you're single region. You probably do want to be there if you're multi-region, in case they roll out something that breaks you, but not everyone else.