N. Virginia is both cheaper and closer to the center of mass of the developed world. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't managed to make it more reliable.
This means that if you were trying to make changes to your EC2 instances in the West using the GUI, you couldn't, even though the instances themselves were unaffected.
I get tired of the snipes from people that "well, you're doing it wrong", as if this is trivial stuff. But if Amazon themselves aren't even making their AWS console redundant between locations, how easy/straightforward is it for anyone else?
To what extent is this just "the cobbler's kids have no shoes?"
We're not talking about a leap in order of magnitude of complexity here—just simple management of common human behavioral tendencies in order to promote more reliability. "The problem is inherently complex" is always true and will always be true, but it's no excuse for not designing a system to gracefully handle that complexity.
You're close. Put another way, "inherent complexity is the problem."
What I mean by that is, the more your system is coupled, the more it is brittle.
Frankly, this is AWS's issue. It is too coupled: RDS relies on EBS, the console relies on both, etc. Any connection between two systems is a POF and must be architected to let those systems operate w/o that connection. This is why SMTP works the way it does. Real time service delivery isn't the problem, but counting on it is.
Uncouple all the things!
Edited: [1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/06/30/amazo...
[1] http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-center-s...
us-east-1 was 11 different datacenters last time I bothered to check.
us-west-2 by comparison is two datacenters. The reason west-1 and west-2 exist is because they are geographically diverse enough to prevent low latency inner-connections (and also have dramatically different power costs so they bill differently).
Weigh this against the estimated costs of your application going down occasionally. It's really only economical for the largest applications (Netflix, etc.) to build these systems.
Every day I have to build basic redundancy into my applications I wish that we could just go with a service provider (like Rackspace / Contegix) that offered more redundancy at the hardware level.
I know the cloud is awesome and all, but having to assume your disks will disappear, fail, go slow at random uncontrollable times is expensive to design around.
If you don't have an elastic load, then the cloud elasticity is pointless - and is ultimately an anchor around your infrastructure.
two c1.medium, which are very nice for webservers, are enough to host >1M pageviews a month (wordpress, not much caching) and cost around $120/mo each, effective $97/mo if you prepay for 12months at a time via reserved instances.