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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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dijit·

It's the:

* Largest (DDoS'd most, most complex, scaling issues etc)

* Oldest (More time for weird idiosyncrasies to take hold)

* Where most testing happens

* Where new products are deployed first

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1) and 2) certainly apply. 3) and 4) don't. Testing in the largest region is one of the biggest anti-patterns.

4 is still generally true. Most new features drop in us-east-1 on launch day.

Usually us-east-1 is deployed to after several smaller regions. Usually it'll fall in the middle of the week depending on the pipeline.

Just because a feature is there on launch day doesn't mean it was deployed to first. Features are often hidden behind flags that are switched for launch.

I'm well aware of that, but the point is that when the feature is ungated to the public, it's in us-east-1 and gets all that load, and more load than the rest because of the fact that a lot of big customers are based in us-east-1, including much of Amazon itself.

AWS doesn't test there last I checked, they roll out to smaller regions first.

Most AWS engineering is closest to (and tested in) us-west-2 (PDX) or us-east-2 (Ohio)

It's also the home of single region services...

IAM, Cloudfront ACM certs, etc

Those are not single-region services. Changes must be executed there, but the data is replicated globally. If you don’t need to make changes in the context of those services, they will keep working in the other regions even during an incident in the primary region.

It's also

* The only place where the IAM dashboard can be accessed from. I need to access it NOW. I can't.

Looking forward to Auckland coming online, which should be the opposite to most of these factors, and will make game streaming bearable (for me)

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