I think this is more akin to shutting down an AZ, rather than a region, which certainly does happen. Except AZ lettering is randomised per AWS account, so your

I think this is more akin to shutting down an AZ, rather than a region, which certainly does happen. Except AZ lettering is randomised per AWS account, so your 'us-east1-a' isn't my 'us-east1-a'. Which means AWS can migrate people away, over time. I believe older accounts which still use the old AZ are given notice that it is closing. Plus, there was the whole closure of AWS EC2 Classic, replaced with AWS VPC. This another reason why deploying over multiple AZs has its benefit. Not just for technical failure, but it means you can still move should one region close down. I suppose an interesting questions is: would I prefer to move a single-AZ deployment such as this in the cloud, or in the real world? And honestly I can see the pros and cons of each. In the cloud it involves a bunch of engineering time (possibly minimal, likely a lot more given reality). In the real-world it involves a temporary fibre connection to the next DC over, and a gradual or rapid move of hardware with the help of some specialist contractors (for example). But at least the state and implementation quirks move with the compute. I can see it either way, but I can feel myself wanting to believe in the latter. There is something about trucking servers across town that appeals me.