AWS partitions its services into isolated regions. This is great for reducing blast radius. Unfortunately, us-east-1 has many times more load than any other r

AWS partitions its services into isolated regions. This is great for reducing blast radius. Unfortunately, us-east-1 has many times more load than any other region. This means that scaling problems hit us-east-1 before any other region, and affect the largest slice of customers. The lesson is that partitioning your service into isolated regions is not enough. You need to partition your load evenly, too. I can think of several ways to accomplish this: 1. Adjust pricing to incentivize customers to move load away from overloaded regions. Amazon has historically done the opposite of this by offering cheaper prices in us-east-1. 2. Calculate a good default region for each customer and show that in all documentation, in the AWS console, and in code examples. 3. Provide tools to help customers choose the right region for their service. Example: http://www.cloudping.info/ http://www.cloudping.info/ (shameless plug). 4. Split the large regions into isolated partitions and allocate customers evenly across them. For example, split us-east-1 into 10 different isolated partitions. Each customer is assigned to a particular partition when they create their account. When they use services, they will use the instances of the services from their assigned partition.