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Comment by igetspam | Hacker News Reader

Wherever possible, don't use us-east-1. It's one of the older regions and parts are aging. Yes, I know there are things that are only available in the old regions but most services are globally available. I've worked with a few ex AWS SWEs and SREs. They drink the kool-aid and won't say anything bad about us-east-1 but they also won't launch net-new services there. YMMV

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This is good advice, but does not help mitigate IAM issues. IAM is a global service.

IAM is mastered in us-east-1 with all writes going there.

I'd much rather use us-west-2 but Lambda@EDGE is only available in us-east-1 :(

The Lambda functions have to be configured in us-east-1, but they don't actually run there - they get replicated to the Cloudfront POPs you're using.

e.g. we set up our L@E functions in us-east-1, run our actual systems in eu-west-1, but 95%+ of our traffic comes in via eu-west-2, and the L@E functions output logs for that traffic to the eu-west-2 CloudWatch.

For Cloudfront stuff, it's not very region dependent.

Yes, but if you have Lambda@Edge it as part of a larger cloudformation stack you are stuck in us-east-1 or using separate stacks.

> things that are only available in the old regions

And usually it's old things, like really really old if something is available in us-east-1 and not us-east-2. I would imagine some ancient ec2 instance types.

If that's they case, maybe AWS should raise the pricing on us-east-1 to fund improvements and/or encourage people to either move off to newer data centers.

They're one of the wealthiest companies in the world and you suggest they should raise prices to raise money to improve one of their older money printing locations? What planet are you from?

They can rebuild that whole datacenter a hundred times over and still not feel it in their wallet.

> They can rebuild that whole datacenter a hundred times over and still not feel it in their wallet.

Agreed.

It's about aligning incentives. If the user cost is the same, but the maintenance costs are higher, then something is broken, or you're eating the cost as a feature.

That’s interesting. As us-east-1 has most of the services, we use them primarily along with us-west-2.

Are you saying us-east-2 would be better than us-east-1?

Generally yes, since as they gained some experience and designed other data centers better. They also generally stay replying changes with us-east-1.

Although IAM service is global one and it is located in us-east-1, so you wouldn't be able to avoid this particular issue.

I know a couple of ex-AWS folks who sort of say the opposite. us-east-1 is supposedly less stable because they roll out updates and new services there first.

That's kind of silly :-)

I used to work for another pretty big company and we knew to roll out changes to the smaller DCs first.

If you look at it the other way. If change works on us-east-1, it should work everywhere else.

If their goal is to reduce the number of affected locations (and not care about number of people) then deploying to us-east-1 makes more sense.

Yeah, but at that scale, they could pick region #5 in terms of traffic and probably cover 5 nines worth of edge cases :-)

So for east coast you would say go Ohio?

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