For those of us who have been using AWS for almost 20 years now, I can't imagine why anyone would willingly choose us-east-1 for anything. It is the oldest, highest traffic, most critical path region and is subject to turbulence.
ha! I saw another comment on here talking about how ec2 doesn't need to be held to the same standard as the power company because it's not as important as real infrastructure.
wish I'd already had this link in my back pocket. our industry needs to take its job, as a whole, much more seriously.
“Global” and “edge” services such as IAM, Route53, CloudFront and so on have dependencies on us-east-1, so even if you don’t think you do, you probably do.
> By some logic, that would mean it is the most battle-tested and highest-stakes (and therefore most carefully-managed) choice
As someone who used to work on the inside, us-east-1 has the biggest pile of legacy workarounds for internal AWS issues, it has a variety of legacy API behaviours that don't exist in other regions, and because everyone picks it as the default, it has significantly more pressure on contested resources (i.e. things like spot instance pools).
Plus since it's the default in all the tooling, if you ever decide to go multi-region, you'll find tons of things break right away.
It can make sense to depend on the thing that will attract massive worldwide attention if/when it goes down. Or, more likely, it's just a default people don't change.
This has always been my takeaway with Go. An imperfect language for imperfect developers, chosen for organizations (not people) to ensure a baseline usefulness of their engineers from junior to senior. Do I like it? No. Would I ever choose it willingly? No. But when the options at the time were Javascript or untyped Python, it may have seemed like a more attractive option. Python was also dealing with a nasty 2-to-3 upgrade at the time that looks foolish in comparison to Golang's automatic formatting and upgrade mechanisms.
Let's not forget just how much of Alan Turing's work went towards "defense of the state" before they discarded him. Even with the royal pardon, my biggest gripe is that they continue to use his name and likeness for anything government affiliated.
When I was a younger man, I fought long and hard and spent many late nights on the phone with the lawyers abroad, to convince my company to open source a tool that I was proud of and thought would help our brand and attract new developers. They finally granted approval, but I was not allowed to accept features or updates, customer service, spend time on fixes, accept pull requests, etc. Unfortunately my name was all over it, and I came to hate the fact that I had championed this, forced to watch the code rot and interest wane because the company couldn't fathom anything OSS besides lobbing some dead code over the wall periodically.
After I left I would still receive emails from frustrated users, but I had no access anymore. I could have forked it, but it just seemed too messy. I made some suggestions and wished them luck.
There is a lesson here, somewhere, but mainly it just convinced me to not rock the boat for the next decade, and to seek out smaller companies for employment.
I think we all have to learn the lesson, when we are young, that forcing people to do something they really don't want rarely ends up going well. You always hope they'll later have some epiphany that you were right, but they almost never really do what you want them to (you wanted them to support the open source project) and even if you were right, they'll rarely figure that out.
It's funny how "shameless plug" actually means "excuse the self-promotion" and implies at least a little bit of shame even when the reference is appropriate and on-topic.
