Now I guess we have to move to us-west-2. :)
Update: looks like it's only one zone anyway, so my statement still stands!
Edit: although, one of our vendors that uses AWS has said that they think ELB registration is impacted (but I don't recall if that's regional?) and R53 is impacted (which is supposed to be global, IIRC). Dunno how much truth there is to it as we don't use AWS directly.
Thanks!
us-west-2 has had outages as well but it is less common, even rare. I've been pushing companies to make their initial deployments onto us-west-2 for over ten years now. I occasionally get kudos messages in my inbox :)
And I think Alexa skills, if anybody cares about those.
So anyone who is in us-west-2 is there intentionally, which makes me assume there is a smaller footprint there (but I have no idea).
If you’re Amazon where every second is millions of $ in transactions you care more than StartUp that has 1 request per minute. Even if you accept the risk, you still care when your DC goes down.
Also, a large chunk of AWS is managed from a single data center so if that one goes down you may still have issues with your service in another data center.
That being said, there is still an added cost and complexity to operate in multiple AZs, because you have to synchronize data across the AZs. Also you have to have enough reserved instances to move into when you lose an AZ, because if you're running lean and each zone is serving 33% of your traffic, suddenly the two that are left need to serve 50% each.
The bigger companies with overhead reservations will get all the instances before you can launch any on demand during an AZ failure.
For AWS specifically, I’m fairly certain they maintain a minimum distance and are much more strict on requirements to be on different grids etc than other Cloud providers. A few years ago they were calling out Azure and Google Cloud on exactly what you describe (having data centers essentially on the same street almost).
Each Availability Zone can be multiple data centers.At full scale, it can contain hundreds of thousands of servers. They are fully isolated partitions of the AWS global infrastructure. With its own powerful infrastructure, an Availability Zone is physically separated from any other zones. There is a distance of several kilometers, although all are within 100 km (60 miles of each other).
Also, I think a lot, but not all of the services I use work okay with multiple regions.
On top of that, I was looking at the documentation for KMS keys yesterday, and a KMS key can be multiregion, but if you don't create it as multiregion from the start, you can't update the multiregion attribute. So you need to create a new KMS key and update everything to use the new multiregion key.