For the last 2 days i have a script that is trying to allocate a c3 instance with no luck. AWS is having crazy capacity problems in us-east (all zones).
Same here. The ones we've managed to snag have been great, but it has made it difficult to scale out in a few situations when they haven't had the capacity.
Keep in mind that your us-east-1a is not necessarily the same as someone else's us-east-1a as they randomly assign the names to reduce the effect of everyone congregating in us-east-1a because it sounds like the best one.