Friends, nobody wants to be in us-east-1. NOBODY.
But migrating out can have a significant cost, and for *most* businesses a three hour outage once a year is not worth the engineering time to fix it - especially when half your customers are also down simultaneously
Stating that anyone using us-east-1 is an idiot just reveals how little experience you have with large system migrations and business tradeoffs.
That said: If you're building something *new* in us-east-1, yes, you are an idiot
@jonty It's also relatively recently that AWS have addressed some of their control plane being heavily tied to us-east-1.
A good example is they're trying to push people off the non-regional STS endpoint, which happens to be in...us-east-1.
As you say, these are all large and complex systems - migrating this stuff is hard & dependencies like this are often hidden many layers deep.
April 18, 2025: AWS has made changes to the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) global endpoint (sts.amazonaws.com) in Regions enabled by default to enhance its resiliency and performance. AWS STS requests to the global endpoint are automatically served in the same AWS Region as your workloads. These changes will not be deployed to opt-in […]
@ahmetkkeles @jonty @forst Not necessarily more frequent than other locales, but dramatically more impactful because that’s where everybody built their stuff for a long time.
In general, when another AWS datacenter goes down, the people who have stuff there notice. When US-East-1 goes down, everybody notices.
@jonty finding all the places some one hard coded that will take more than 3 hours. Never mind testing the changes afterwards.
Hell I fixed a bug in a very widely used library the other day that had it hard coded for at least 3 months before any one noticed.
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