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Comment by ryanmcdonough | Hacker News Reader

Now, I may well be naive - but isn't the point of these systems that you fail over gracefully to another data centre and no-one notices?

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It should be! When I was a complete newbie at AWS my first question was why do you have to pick a region, I thought the whole point was you didn't have to worry about that stuff

As far as I know, region selection is about regulation and privacy and guarantees on that.

The region labels found within the metadata are very very powerful.

They make lawyers happy and they stop intelligence services to access the associated resources.

For example, no one would even consider accessing data from a European region without the right paperwork.

Because if they were caught they'd have to pay _thousands_ of dollars in fines and get sternly talked to be high ranking officials.

It's also about latency and nearness to users. Also some regions don't have all features so feature set also matters.

One might hope that this, too, would be handled by the service. Send the traffic to the closest region, and then fallback to other regions as necessary. Basically, send the traffic to the closest region that can successfully serve it.

But yeah, that's pretty hard and there are other reasons customers might want to explicitly choose the region.

> another data centre

Yes, within the same region. Doing stuff cross-region takes a little bit more effort and cost, so many skip it.

Assuming that the service actually bothered to have multiple regions as fallbacks configured.

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