[Eridrus]

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.

[skywhopper]

It wasn’t even all of a single AZ. None of my resources in use1-az4 had any issues. The most annoying thing was the 20 notifications we got saying “it’s not all fixed yet” every hour.

[linsomniac]

>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.

[electroly]

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.

[coleca]

Sometimes you need capacity and you have to choose where the capacity is not where you would like it to be. Unfortunately, the days of cloud bursting, and thinking of the cloud as an unlimited resource where you can spin up and spin down machines at will is vanishing. Power availability and supply chain lead times combined with unprecedented demand are the reason for this. That's why you see all the hyperscalers recently reporting on their "backlog" in their earnings reports.

[christina97]

But it’s okay to be down when the whole internet is down.

[Eridrus]

90% of customers are located in use-1. Latency to use-1 is more important than being up when everyone else is down.

[nilamo]

> And honestly, everybody else's stuff is in use-1, so at least your failures are correlated with your customers lol.

Is it not a selling point to be able to say "we're still up while out competitors are down"?

[Eridrus]

We do win some deals on reliability, and have lost some, but AWS outages are not an important factor in any of this.

It's not that I think reliability doesn't matter at all, but most of our services are not multi region and it's bot the driving factor in SaaS reliability.

[bink]

It's worse when your region has issues and your customer's infrastructure is fine.

[skywhopper]

If you’re the one that’s down while no one else is, suddenly it becomes your fault.

[grogenaut]

none of my stuff is in us-east-1. I chose that specifically 15 years ago. Been a great decision.