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Comment by dolibasija | Hacker News Reader

One of our EC2 instances in us-east-1c is unavailable and stuck in "stopping" state after a force stop. Interestingly enough, EC2 instances in us-east-1b don't seem to be affected.

The console is throwing errors from time to time. As usual no information on AWS status page.

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Instances stuck in the "stopping" state is pretty common, in my experience.

The affected zone is use1-az4. Whatever that maps to (1a, 1b, 1c) is different per customer.

you can find out which zone is mapped to use1-az4 for your account with awscli:

    aws ec2 describe-availability-zones | jq -r '.AvailabilityZones[] | select(.ZoneId == "use1-az4") | .ZoneName'

Or if you open the EC2 console (it's up this time!) and scroll down to the bottom.

https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=us-east-1#...:

(Edit: I hope I didn't sound sarcastic. I don't open random console pages and scroll all the way down to check for new features. Some people will have noticed, some won't.)

I had the same issue with unavailable, but on an instance in us-east-1b. Finally just got the force stop to go through a minute ago and it's now running and available again.

Your us-east-1b may be the parents us-east-1c.

The letters are randomised per AWS account so that instances are spread evenly and biases to certain letters don't lead to biases to certain zones.

Huh, that's interesting. Didn't know that, but makes sense.

It's pretty cool. If I recall, they call it "shuffle sharding."

You can check which availability zone is with: aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --region us-east-1

I'm not sure if we should say "AWS is down" if only us-east-1 is down. That region is more unstable than Marjorie Taylor Greene on a one-legged stool.

> I'm not sure if we should say "AWS is down" if only us-east-1 is down.

The thing is, us-east-1 represents the whole AWS for the majority of us.

Can you expand on that? What feature do you use in east 1 that isn’t everywhere else that it’s your whole implementation?

> Can you expand on that? What feature do you use in east 1 that isn’t everywhere else that it’s your whole implementation?

Your question reads as a strawman. It matters nothing if EC2 is also available in Mumbai or Hong Kong if by default the whole world deploys everything and anything to us-east-1, and us-east-1 alone.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/nztxa5/why_useast1_reg...

It's not a strawman. There's a huge difference between "AWS is down" and "customers don't know how to use AWS". For the people who use AWS correctly, they only had some degraded service, not downtime.

> It's not a strawman. There's a huge difference between "AWS is down" and "customers don't know how to use AWS".

Deploying a service to a single region is not, nor has it ever been, "customers don't know how to use AWS".

If anything, cargo culting this belief in global deployments being necessary, specially with services that have at most a regional demand, is a telltale sign a customer has no idea about what he is doing and is just mindlessly wasting money and engineering effort in something no one needs.

This blend of bad cargo cult advice sounds like a variant of microservices everywhere.

There many AWS services which have only global endpoints and not specific to geo, all of these are hosted on us-east-1 .

And only one AZ in us-east-1. But... it's clearly having a large impact as well.

The 1c part is meaningless. Those letters are randomized per customer to prevent letter biases from leading to more people in 1a for instance.

Was stuck on stopping in us-east-1b. Cannot start now.

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