Hacker News Reader

Comment by herge | Hacker News Reader

Is US-east the least reliable of all AWS data centres? Arguably, Virginia is more susceptible to natural disasters than Oregon or Northern California (while we wait for that 1 in a 100 year earthquake).

View on HN

It's also by far the most heavily used of AWS regions, so they face many scale problems there that other regions don't have to worry about yet. And it was the first, so there's probably some legacy baggage there (i.e. they've learned from mistakes when building other regions).

I prefer Dallas (Colo4, specifically). They've been incredible. Only one significant outage in 7 years. They're nearly half way between coasts too, so they're a great latency compromise if you're stuck with a single DC.

AWS doesn't have a presence in Texas.

Rackspace also has a big data center in DFW. I only remember one or two outages in the last several years.

AWS actually operates 5 independent data centers (called availability zones) within the same complex that make up the us-east-1 region. This makes them significantly more likely to experience an outage in 1 availability zone, but also makes it much easier to architect around the problem.

Actually, AWS has more than 10 data centers that make up US-East-1. This was mentioned in the post-mortem published last week.

Availability zones in US-East-1 are at least one data center, but may be multiple facilities in geographic proximity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com