Yeah certainly the existence of credentials etc must be replicated to deal with cross-region connectivity issues etc. - which I guess explains why authenticatio

Yeah certainly the existence of credentials etc must be replicated to deal with cross-region connectivity issues etc. - which I guess explains why authentication is still working fine GovCloud I believe is technically separated in this regard, I don't think IAM credentials can operate across partitions. Though it does seem to be possible to link the existence of a standard AWS account with GovCloud, the same is not true of the China partition