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Can you cite something about this? I can't find anything, except confirming that's not true [1]. Your profile says you work at AWS so I assume you have inside

Can you cite something about this? I can't find anything, except confirming that's not true [1]. Your profile says you work at AWS so I assume you have inside info on this. Perhaps you could also explain why this change would get made? I always considered it pretty smart to do - With consistent machines, wouldn't the lowered-lettered zones get significantly more traffic? Most of my deploys go to a+b or a+b+c (and I have various services running in 5 different regions, I think). I'm not sure I even have anything running in more than 3 AZs, and thus never use AZ d, for example. I'm positive I'm not alone in that style of setup. ---- EDIT: Just comparing two accounts I have (which are linked, if that makes a difference), it does in fact look like most regions do have the same mappings. us-east-1 and us-west-2 are definitely different, but all the other ones I checked seem to be the same. They're not all consistent (a=1, b=2, etc) though, but for example, these are the same on both accounts: AZ Name AZ ID eu-central-1a euc1-az2 eu-central-1b euc1-az3 eu-central-1c euc1-az1 eu-west-3a euw3-az1 eu-west-3b euw3-az2 eu-west-3c euw3-az3 ap-south-1a aps1-az1 ap-south-1b aps1-az3 ap-south-1c aps1-az2 I still find this silly. Anyone following basic examples or deploying single-AZ is going to provision stuff in the "a" zone. That zone must be 10x bigger than "c" in any given region. It blows my mind. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/vpc-map-cross-account-availability-zones/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/vpc-m...

toast0 6y ago
> Perhaps you could also explain why this change would get made? I'm not related to Amazon/AWS (I'm not even a customer of AWS), but if it were my decision, I would want the mappings to be the same for everyone, because customer specific mappings makes it harder for customers to coordinate. Ex: if I'm your customer and we're both on AWS and want to have the best experience between servers, I'd like to put my VMs that talk to yours in the availability zones you're in. If I want to have the highest availability talking to your servers, again, I want to be in the same zones as you --- or at least if I'm in -1a and you're in -1b, I should expect to need to go to a different geo from time to time if only one AZ has an incident. This is a lot harder if some of the identifiers mean different things. Re: balancing. Thehre's usually ways to influence people. Default choices in the console, asking big customers to put new VMs in other zones or rebalance, spot prices, etc. I've been a big enough customer to see that at other hosting. If the top 10 customers control 50% of the VMs (made up statistic, but I was a #1 customer controlling 50% of a DCs traffic, so plausible), you only need to have a few conversations to get things moving.
rephlex2097 6y ago
Every account has the AZ names randomised. My eu-central-1a is not your eu-central-1a but may be your eu-central-1c.
NBJack 6y ago
Zone IDs are meant to reconcile this. And due to the nature of my job, it creates plenty of headaches explaining why two accounts can have different AZ names for the 'same' place. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ram/latest/userguide/working-with-az-ids.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ram/latest/userguide/working-wit... My understanding of the 'why' AWS did this for many regions was to avoid folks hammering the "first" zone they came across (a) when they either didn't care about multi-zone availability or were ignorant of the difference it made. If everyone hops in the 'first' zone, you could end up with disproportionate amounts of traffic. Either way, given how many new regions don't do this (either because they stopped, or that new regions tend to come up slowly one zone at a time), it seems they've abandoned the practice. Unfortunately, even new accounts in these legacy regions still end up with randomized mappings. I also suspect they didn't care much about this until cross-account features were offered.

toast0 6y ago

> Perhaps you could also explain why this change would get made? I'm not related to Amazon/AWS (I'm not even a customer of AWS), but if it were my decision, I would want the mappings to be the same for everyone, because customer specific mappings makes it harder for customers to coordinate. Ex: if I'm your customer and we're both on AWS and want to have the best experience between servers, I'd like to put my VMs that talk to yours in the availability zones you're in. If I want to have the highest availability talking to your servers, again, I want to be in the same zones as you --- or at least if I'm in -1a and you're in -1b, I should expect to need to go to a different geo from time to time if only one AZ has an incident. This is a lot harder if some of the identifiers mean different things. Re: balancing. Thehre's usually ways to influence people. Default choices in the console, asking big customers to put new VMs in other zones or rebalance, spot prices, etc. I've been a big enough customer to see that at other hosting. If the top 10 customers control 50% of the VMs (made up statistic, but I was a #1 customer controlling 50% of a DCs traffic, so plausible), you only need to have a few conversations to get things moving.

rephlex2097 6y ago

Every account has the AZ names randomised. My eu-central-1a is not your eu-central-1a but may be your eu-central-1c.

NBJack 6y ago

Zone IDs are meant to reconcile this. And due to the nature of my job, it creates plenty of headaches explaining why two accounts can have different AZ names for the 'same' place. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ram/latest/userguide/working-with-az-ids.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ram/latest/userguide/working-wit... My understanding of the 'why' AWS did this for many regions was to avoid folks hammering the "first" zone they came across (a) when they either didn't care about multi-zone availability or were ignorant of the difference it made. If everyone hops in the 'first' zone, you could end up with disproportionate amounts of traffic. Either way, given how many new regions don't do this (either because they stopped, or that new regions tend to come up slowly one zone at a time), it seems they've abandoned the practice. Unfortunately, even new accounts in these legacy regions still end up with randomized mappings. I also suspect they didn't care much about this until cross-account features were offered.