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Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
- david_shaw 9mo agoYes, it's the least reliable. Thanks for summarizing the data here to illustrate the issue. It's often seen as the "standard" or "default" region to use when spinning up new US-based AWS services, is the oldest AWS center, has the most interconnected systems, and likely has the highest average load. It makes sense that us-east-1 has reliability problems, but I wish Amazon was a little more upfront about some of the risks when choosing that zone.
- Forgeties79 9mo agoNobody ever got fired for connecting to us-east-1
- yibers 9mo agoAss covering-wise, you are probably better off going down with everyone else on us-east-1. The not so fun alternative: being targeted during an RCA explaining why you chose some random zone no one ever heard of.
- riffic 9mo agohow about following the well-architected framework and building something with a suitable level of 9s where you can justify your decisions during a blameless postmortem (please stamp your buzzword bingo card for a prize.)
- paradox460 9mo agoWe vibe code everything in flavor of the month node frameworks, tyvm, because elixir is too hard to hire for (or some equally inane excuse)
- DANmode 9mo agoI agree with your post conceptually. However: Don’t underestimate community support (in the areas you’re likely to want it) when comparing development stacks.
- paradox460 9mo agoConversely, a community means nothing if they flit from one "best practice" to another
- transcriptase 9mo agoI look forward to the eventual launch of a new and improved version of your app using electron. What’s the point in having 64 Gb of DDR5 and 16 cores @ 4.2 GHz if not to be able to have a couple electron apps sitting at idle yet somehow still using the equivalent computational resources of the most powerful supercomputer on earth in the mid 1990s.
- paradox460 9mo agoWe also plan to incorporate a full local llm, to ensure we fill the memory up. It will be used to direct people to our online knowledge base, which will always be empty
- transcriptase 9mo agoMake sure another LLM summarizes pages upon loading, but doesn’t load any content before that completes. Each page should have a few megs of JS tracking scripts siphoning the users CPU to create massive logs on AWS that nobody will ever use to improve anything. Oh and put everything behind the strictest cloudflare settings you can, so that even a whiff of anything that’s not a Windows 11 laptop or iPhone on a major U.S. network residential or mobile IP gets non-stop bot checks!
- thejosh 9mo agoBandwidth cost is also another major reason.
- rconti 9mo agoPlaces nobody's ever heard of like "Ohio" or "Oregon"? Yeah, I'm not worried about being targeted in an RCA and pointedly asked why I chose a region with way better uptime than `us-tirefire-1`. What _is_ worth considering is whether your more carefully considered region will perform better during an actual outage where some critical AWS resource goes down in Virginia, taking my region with it anyway.
- xingped 9mo agoIIRC, some AWS services are solely deployed on and/or entirely dependent on us-east-1. I don't recall which ones, but I very distinctly remember this coming up once.
- cj 9mo agoAWS IAM has caused multiple cross-region outages.
- nothrabannosir 9mo agoCloudFront certificates
- nexus-uw 9mo agoIAM
- technicalape 9mo agoEverything new basically, like the AI services.
- paulddraper 9mo agoIAM and Route53 have dependencies on us-east-1. AWS Organizations/Account management is us-east-1. And if you want a CDN with a custom hostname and want TLS…you have to use us-east-1.
- TonyCoffman 9mo agoThe Route53 control plane is in us-east-1, with an optional temporary auto-failover to us-west-2 during outages. The data plane for public zones is globally distributed and highly resilient, with a 100% SLA. It continues to serve DNS records during regular control plane outages in us-east-1, but access to make changes is lost during outages. CloudFront CDN has a similar setup. The SSL certificate and key have to be hosted in us-east-1 for control plane operations but once deployed, the public data plane is globally or regionally dispersed. There is no auto failover for the cert dependency yet. The SLA is only three 9s. Also depends on Route53. The elephant in the room for hyperscalers is the potential for rogue employees or a cyber attack on a control plane. Considering the high stakes and economic criticality of these platforms, both are inevitable and both have likely already happened.
- throwawaysleep 9mo agoThis to me was the real lesson of the outage. A us-east-1 outage is treated like bad weather. A regional outage can be blamed on the dev. us-east-1 is too big to get blamed, which is why it should be the region of choice for an employee.
- dontdoxxme 9mo agoWhy aren't you using IBM cloud?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- throwawaysleep 9mo agoIf IBM still had a good reputation, I probably would.
- skissane 9mo agoI’ve seen people go with IBM Cloud because their salespeople were willing to discount more heavily than AWS/GCP/Azure were. Tier 2 players can be hungrier for your business than tier 1 are. And here I’m talking about completely mainstream workloads (Linux, K8S, etc) Separately from that, if you are trying to move certain types of non-mainstream IBM workloads to cloud (AIX, IBM i, z/OS) then IBM is tier 1 in that case
- Esophagus4 9mo agoBizarre way of making decisions. us-east-2 is objectively a better region to pick if you want US east, yet you feel safer picking use1 because “I’m safer making a worse decision that everyone understands is worse, as long as everyone else does it as well.”
- nemomarx 9mo agoIt's about risk profile. The question isn't "which region goes down the least" but "how often will I be blamed for an outage." If you never get blamed for a US east outage, that's better than us-east-2 if that could get you blamed 0.5% of the time when it goes down and us1 isn't down or etc
- kristianc 9mo agoI find it funny that we see complaints about why software quality has got worse alongside people advocating to choose objectively risky AWS regions for career risk and blame minimisation reasons.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- goalieca 9mo agoThis was always the case. The OG saying was “no one got fired for buying IBM”. Then it was changed to Microsoft. And so on..
- throwawaysleep 9mo agoThey are for the same reason. How do customers react to either? If us-east-1 fails, nobody complains. If Microsoft uses a browser to render components on Windows and eats all of your RAM, nobody complains.
- bigstrat2003 9mo agoOh, people complain. The companies responsible have just gotten to the point where they are so entrenched that they don't need to care at all about customer complaints.
- zx8080 9mo agoIt all sticks with the 'monopoly' scent.
- zx8080 9mo agoThe value now is not really money from customers, but a company's share price or valuation. That, together with the hard push for subscriptions from every single app and service, devaluated customer experience and feedback. Because not many will go through the hell of unsubscribing process even after the outage or serious issues like private data stolen. There's just not much motivation left to do better systems.
- nothrabannosir 9mo ago> being targeted during an RCA explaining why you chose some random zone no one ever heard of. “Duh, because there’s an AZ in us-east-1 where you can’t configure EBS volumes for attachment to fargate launch type ECS tasks, of course. Everybody knows that…” :p
- jordanb 9mo agoIstr major resource unavailability in US-East-2 during one of the big US-East-1 outages because people were trying to fail over. Then a week later there was a US-East-2 outage that didn't make the news. So if you tried to be "smart" and set up in Ohio you got crushed by the thundering herd coming out of Virginia and then bit again because aws barely cares about you region and neither does anyone else. The truth is Amazon doesn't have any real backup for Virginia. They don't have the capacity anywhere else and the whole geographic distribution scheme is a chimera.
- Fhch6HQ 9mo agoThis is an interesting point. As recently as mid-2023 us-east-2 was 3 campuses with a 5 building design capacity at each. I know they've expanded by multiples since, but us-east-1 would still dwarf them. Makes one wonder, does us-west-2 have the capacity to take on this surge?
- redditor98654 9mo agous-west-2 is indeed very large, but will still not be able to take a full failover from us-east-1
- g947o 9mo ago> explaining why you chose some random zone no one ever heard of Is this from real experience of something that actually happened, or just imagined? The only things that matter in a decision are: * Services that are available in the region * (if relevant and critical) Latency to other services * SLAs for the region Everything else is irrelevant. If you think AWS is so bad that their SLAs are not trustworthy, that's a different problem to solve.
- theturtle 9mo agoI searched for it, and did not find, the word "backhoe." Big fail. I have said for years, never ascribe to terrorism what can be attributed to some backhoe operator in Ashburn, Virginia. We got a lotta backhoes in northern Virginia.
- arusahni 9mo agoThe sorting for the "Duration" column appears to be lexicographical, not numeric.
- davidfstr 9mo agoI intentionally avoid using us-east-1 for anything, since I’ve seen so many outages.
- temp0826 9mo agous-east-1 is often a lynchpin for services worldwide. Something hinky happening to dns or dynamodb in us-east-1 will probably wreck your day regardless of where you set up shop.
- secondcoming 9mo agoWe get constant resource issues in GCP’s us-east4 region
- nadis 9mo agoCackling while reading this visiting my family in Northern Virginia for the holidays. Despite it being a prominent place in the history of the web, it's still the least reliable AWS region (for now).
- rayiner 9mo agoIts nice to know that where I grew up is Too Big to Fail lol.
- the__alchemist 9mo agoI don't know if this is still true, or related, but that area used to be (Circa 10-30 years ago) very highly prone to power outages. The reason was lots of old trees near the lines that would inevitably fall; blackouts in local areas were common due to this.
- Fhch6HQ 9mo agoThat's an interesting data point, but I don't think it's relevant. The datacenters themselves are designed with a high level of power reliability and can island themselves if needed. We've started to see some rather interesting consequences for grid reliability: https://blog.gridstatus.io/byte-blackouts-large-data-center-loads-new-issues-pjm/ https://blog.gridstatus.io/byte-blackouts-large-data-center-...
- noosphr 9mo agoAt 34 hours of downtime that's two nines of uptime At this point my garage is tied for reliability with us-east-1 largely because it got flooded 8 month ago.
- emersonrsantos 9mo agoGlad to use us-west-2 for reasons.
- kankerlijer 9mo agoThere are only two kinds of cloud regions: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses
- kachapopopow 9mo agoI like this a lot, this is a great comparison for hetzner american offerings since it's not big enough for them to even bother investing much into it so there's not that many complains about it. People just dumping it (me included) after discovering the amount of random issues it has probably also doesn't help. if you are using hetzner: avoid everything other than fra region, ideally pray that you are placed in the newer part of the datacenter since it has the upgraded switching spine I haven't seen the old one in a bit so they might have deprecated it entirely.
- jeltz 9mo agoHetzner does not have any "fra region". They have Helsinki, Falkstien and Nuremberg in Europe. None of them which has any issues as far as I know. They used to have some issues with the very old stuff in Falkstien.
- kachapopopow 9mo agosorry, fsn* I have them typod fra internally and keep messing it up since it's stuck in my head.
- Manouchehri 9mo agoYeah, I was often the single source of reporting Claude outages (or even missing support completely) on less commonly used Amazon Bedrock regions.
- htrp 9mo agoWhich regions were you using ? ( Thought claude had global inference support that routed to all regions)
- therobots927 9mo agoOf course it is, all of the NSA men in the middle add a lot of overhead that can interfere with regular operations.
- alexjurkiewicz 9mo agoI think part of this is that Status Page updates require AWS engineers to post them. In the smaller Tokyo (ap-northeast-1) region, we've had several outages which didn't appear on the status page.
- calmbonsai 9mo agoAnswer these questions: - Is X region and its services covered by a suitable SLA? https://aws.amazon.com/legal/service-level-agreements/ https://aws.amazon.com/legal/service-level-agreements/ - Does X region have all the explicit services you need? (note things like certs and iam are "global" so often implicitly US-East-1) - What are your PoP latency requirements? - Do you have concerns about sovereign data: hosting, ingress, and egress? https://pages.awscloud.com/rs/112-TZM-766/images/AWS_Public_Sector_Day_Navigating_Digital_Sovereignty_and_Data_Protection_with_AWS.pdf https://pages.awscloud.com/rs/112-TZM-766/images/AWS_Public_...
- JojoFatsani 9mo agoYes
- bzGoRust 9mo agoThe test environment is deployed on us-east-1, whereas the production environment deployed on us-west-2 on our side.
- yearolinuxdsktp 9mo agoUs-east-1 is far far from least reliable. It’s one of the more reliable ones. Smaller regions tend to have more reliability issues affecting the entire AZ. This analysis is skewed due to the major incident in 2025. What was the data for 2024 and over the last, say, 5 years? So the proclamation of least reliable of us-east-1 is based on 1 year of data, and it’s probably fair to say that at least last 3 years if not 5 are a better predictor of reliability. us-east-1 also hosts some special things, so it will have more services to lose.
- mlhpdx 9mo agoI stopped deploying to a single region for production years ago, so I don’t really have a horse in this region comparison race. That said, I’ve seen network level issues in every region I use — nothing like the big outage, but issues that may disrupt a service. Designing for how the world is rather than how I wish it was makes a lot of sense to me.
- bob1029 9mo agoI think if you need something more reliable than us-east-1 that you should be hosting on prem in facilities you own and operate. There aren't that many businesses that truly can't handle the worst case (so far) AWS outage. Payment processing is the strongest example I can come up with that is incompatible with the SLA that a typical cloud provider can offer. Visa going down globally for even a few minutes might be worse than a small town losing its power grid for an entire week. It's a hell of a lot easier to just go down with everyone else, apologize on Twitter, and enjoy a forced snow day. Don't let it frustrate you. Stay focused on the business and customer experience. It's not ideal to be down, but there are usually much bigger problems to solve. Chasing an extra x% of uptime per year is usually not worth a multicloud/region clusterfuck. These tend to be even less resilient on average.
- jl6 9mo ago> worst case (so far) It’s kind of amazing that after nearly 20 years of “cloud”, the worst case so far still hasn’t been all that bad. Outages are the mildest type of incident. A true cloud disaster would be something like a major S3 data loss event, or a compromise of the IAM control plane. That’s what it would take for people to take multi-region/multi-cloud seriously.
- svelle 9mo ago> A true cloud disaster would be something like a major S3 data loss event So like the OVH data center fire back in 2021?
- jl6 9mo agoNo, a major one. (No shade on OVH, but they are ~1% market share player)
- dijit 9mo agoI mean, EBS went offline and people were ok to continue using AWS… https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/04/amazons-lengthy-cloud-outage-shows-the-danger-of-complexity/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/04/amazo...
- bmitch3020 9mo agoThis story missed a glaring detail. There are simply more data centers in northern VA [0]. More than the rest of the US by a wide margin, or the entire EU+Asia. Things break here because it's where most things are. [0]: https://www.datacenters.com/providers/amazon-aws/data-center-locations?view=Map https://www.datacenters.com/providers/amazon-aws/data-center...
- vivzkestrel 9mo agosort by duration on that page is broken