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Comment by acwan93 | Hacker News Reader

In all seriousness, we've been deploying everything on us-west-2, and it seems to have dodged most of the outages recently. Is there something special about that data center?

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Classically, us-east-1 received most of the hate given its immense size (it used to be several times larger than any other) and status as the first large aws data center. It also seemed to launch new aws features first but that may have been my imagination. If true, I'm sure always running the latest builds was not great for stability.

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 :)

93.99999

There are six 9s in there. Pretty solid!

Maybe Amazon should make us-east-1's actual datacenter change depend on the customer, as they do with the AZs :P

Doesn't AWS IoT run only in us-east-1?

And I think Alexa skills, if anybody cares about those.

I believe us-east-1 runs some of the control plane and an us-east outage can effectively take a service in a different region offline as it can break IAM authentication

It's never been a default datacenter. For a long time the default when you first logged into the console was us-east-1 so a lot of companies set up there (that's where all of reddit was run for a long time and Netflix too). At some point they switched the default to us-east-2.

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).

Rather the opposite - us-west-2 is big but not the biggest region, or the smallest, or the oldest or newest, it's not partitioned off like the China or GovCloud regions. Because us-west-2 is fairly typical it tends to be one of the last regions to get software updates, after they've been tested in prod elsewhere

Looks like this particular issue was due to power loss, and for power us-west-2 has one clear advantage: It's power is directly from the Columbia river and highly unlikely to have demand based outages.

Maybe not the entire region. Amazon was reportedly building a data center complex next to the natural gas Hermiston Generating Plant some distance from the river.

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