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In the past, when an AZ goes down, everyone tries to transfer to another AZ and makes lots of API calls.

Consequently AWS has to rate-limit API requests to avoid taking another AZ down.

Maybe this has changed though, but we'll probably have to wait for another disaster to know!

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But of course, an AZ shouldn't be your infrastructure's single point of failure!

I'm aware of the API rate limit when an AZ goes down, but the original comment was about problems that people run into for highly-variable traffic sites that scale up and down on a regular basis (e.g. spin up 20 instances during the day with high traffic, at night shutdown 15 of them to save cost, on a daily basis). This of course is not related to any AZ/API downtime, and I am not aware of any problems that could interfere with the normal usage of APIs during normal service operations, which is why I wanted to hear more about the details of those problems.

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