Especially because AWS regions are broken up into multiple availability zones (data centres in the same area). So taking out a single data centre won't do much if the AWS customers have correctly designed their systems for high-availability (ie having redundant instances in other AZs/regions with their data backed up elsewhere).
Most likely inertia. us-east-1 was the first AWS region, gets new features released there first and is the largest in the USA, so many companies have been running their for many years, and the cost of moving to us-east-2 > the cost of occasional AWS created downtime.
"(Amazon) will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new Region will be based in Cape Town, will be comprised of three Availability Zones, and will
give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in South Africa."
Actually I assumed AWS did it the same way as the others - I thought maybe they are in another building on a campus but I didn’t think that should be a factor in planning and that I should use regions for geographic redundancy anyway.
For us, it's mostly a matter of historical convention. Our entire stack currently lives in -1 (we've had instances there for ~5 years now), and to move to a different region under these pretenses is a bit of a pain in the ass for us considering how transient the impact of these things has typically been to our business.
If we move anywhere, its going to be completely out of AWS and into on-prem or some bare metal provider. Hopping regions hoping to win at some reliability metric game is not a good way to run a business IMO.
Not really, from AWS perspective it's about locating regions close to potential customers with $$$ and a desire for a local region. That desire might be due to regulatory requirements or poor connectivity to other regions.
It is redundant to a degree, but there are varying layers of redundancy.
In this case, it looks like most users of AWS are in need of more geographic redundancy, but in terms of localized data redundancy (term?), it appears AWS is a pretty solid solution.
I have a suspicion that AWS uses some regions as canaries. Because we control both ends of things, I have personally noted that certain AWS functions clearly break in Australia first.
A blog post last month touched on this:
"Q: Why is reddit tied so tightly to the affected availability zone?
A: When we started with Amazon, our code was written with the assumption that there would be one data center. We have been working towards fixing this since we moved two years ago. Unfortunately, progress has been slow in this area. Luckily, we are currently in a hiring round which will increase the technical staff by 200% :) These new programmers will help us address this issue."
Not sure if the costs of data transfer between regions (charged at full internet price) would justify the added reliability/lower latency though.
The real reason is us-east-1 was the first and by far the biggest region, the same reason that new services always launch there but other regions are are not necessarily required (some services have to launch in every region).
The us-east-1 region is consistently pushing the limits of scale for the AWS services, thus is has way more problems than other regions.
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).
No -- if they needed to they already would have migrated to a multi-region. If they don't need it -- they won't have. The reason is simple -- it's expensive as you say. I'm not a fanboi or evangelist of AWS either -- I do have pet theories they named their products with shit names in order to make more money by making AWS skills less transferable to Google Cloud etc. S3 should be Amazon FTP, RDS should be Amazon SQL etc.
Current employer it's all in ap-southeast-2 because of data sovereignty concerns.
Getting the Melbourne AWS Region up next year[1] will be good for redundancy.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-...
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