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Comment by edgan | Hacker News Reader

The us-east-1 region gets treated differently than all other regions by AWS. Part of the reason it gets treated differently it is the default, and hence the most popular. It also doesn't help that it is on the east coast, and experiences more weather.

For the above reasons, and that I work in the SF bay area, I put everything in us-west-2. us-west-2 sometimes has it's own issues, but nothing quite at the level of us-east-1.

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We're all just huddling in us-east-1 waiting for the day us-west-2 falls into the ocean...

us-east-1 data is replicated to another region on the west coast behind the scenes. Its supposed to fail over automatically.

http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after-write-consistenc...

> Aha! I had forgotten about the way Amazon defines its S3 regions. US-Standard has servers on both the east and west coasts (remember, this is S3 not EC2) in the same logical “region”. The engineering challenges in providing read-after-write consistency in a smaller geographical area are greatly magnified when that area is expanded. The fundamental physical limitation is the speed of light, which takes at least 16 milliseconds to cross the US coast-to-coast (that’s in a vacuum – it takes at least four times as long over the internet due to the latency introduced by routers and switches along the way).

IIRC, the AWS console itself is hosted out of us-east-1. Which means you're always somewhat exposed to whatever failure modes it has.

This is no longer true.

East1 is absurdly huge, isn't it? I saw statements to the effect that its nearly 60% of AWS's capacity.

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