I don't see a us-fail-1 region being set up for a number of reasons. One, this is not how AWS regions are designed to work. What they're thinking of is a virtu

I don't see a us-fail-1 region being set up for a number of reasons. One, this is not how AWS regions are designed to work. What they're thinking of is a virtual region with none of its own datacenters, but AWS has internal assumptions about what a region is that are baked into their codebase. I think it would be a massive undertaking to simulate a region like this. (I don't think a fail AZ would work either, arguably it'd be worse because all the code that automatically enumerates AZs would have to skip it, which is going to be all over the place.) Two, set up a region with deliberate problems, and idiots will run their production workload in it. It doesn't matter how many banners and disclaimers you set up on the console, they'll click past them. When customer support points out they shouldn't be doing this, the idiot screams at them, "but my whole business is down! You have to DO something!" This would be a small number of customers, but the support guys get all of them. Three, AWS services depend on other AWS services. There are dozens of AWS services, each like little companies with varying levels of maturity. They ought to design all their stuff to gracefully respond to outages, but they have business priorities and many services won't want to set up in us-fail-1. When a region adds special constraints, it has a high likelihood of being a neglected region like GovCloud.