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Thanks! did not know that.

Interesting! Do you know anywhere I can read more about this?

Yep, it's in the documentation [0].

[0] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-reg...

Wow, how did I not know this? Thanks for the info.

They randomise the AZ letters, because humans tend to shove things in 'a' before anywhere else - it's a psychological load-balancer.

If you want to figure out which of your AZs corresponds to another account's AZs, you can compare spot-prices, which are individual per AZ. Also, for some reason, my account doesn't have a 'b', just a-c-d-e. Weird.

They also introduced us-east-1f, and it's the same for everyone because it's new :).

Not sure why I was downvoted. This was mentioned in an issue of Last Week in AWS [0].

[0] https://snarkive.lastweekinaws.com/issue_14-_US-East-1_Drops...

Interesting that the idea is to distribute load across the zones (because people default to using A), but Google Cloud zones are uniform across all accounts and it seems to work for Google.