1. The main one: it's the cheapest region, so when people select where to run their services they pick it because "why pay more?"
2. It's the default. Many tutorials and articles online show it in the examples, many deployment and other devops tools use it as a default value.
3. Related to n.2. AI models generate cloud configs and code examples with it unless asked otherwise.
4. It's location make it Europe-friendly, too. If you have a small service and you'd like to capture European and North American audience from a single location us-east-1 is a very good choice.
5. Many Amazon features are available in that region first and then spread out to other locations.
6. It's also a region where other cloud providers and hosting companies offer their services. Often there's space available in a data center not far from AWS-running racks. In hybrid cloud scenarios where you want to connect bits of your infrastructure running on AWS and on some physical hardware by a set of dedicated fiber optic lines us-east-1 is the place to do it.
7. Yes, for AWS deployments it's an experimental location that has higher risks of downtime compared to other regions, but in practice when a sizable part of us-east-1 is down other AWS services across the world tend to go down, too (along with half of the internet). So, is it really that risky to run over there, relatively speaking?
It's the world's default hosting location, and today's outages show it.
In every SKU I've ever looked at / priced out, all of the AWS NA regions have ~equal pricing. What's cheaper specifically in us-east-1?
> Europe-friendly
Why not us-east-2?
> Many Amazon features are available in that region first and then spread out to other locations.
Well, yeah, that's why it breaks. Using not-us-east-1 is like using an LTS OS release: you don't get the newest hotness, but it's much more stable as a "build it and leave it alone" target.
> It's also a region where other cloud providers and hosting companies offer their services. Often there's space available in a data center not far from AWS-running racks.
This is a better argument, but in practice, it's very niche — 2-5ms of speed-of-light delay doesn't matter to anyone but HFT folks; anyone else can be in a DC one state away with a pre-arranged tier1-bypassing direct interconnect, and do fine. (This is why OVH is listed on https://www.cloudinfrastructuremap.com/ despite being a smaller provider: their DCs have such interconnects.)
For that matter, if you want "low-latency to North America and Europe, and high-throughput lowish-latency peering to many other providers" — why not Montreal [ca-central-1]? Quebec might sound "too far north", but from the fiber-path perspective of anywhere else in NA or Europe, it's essentially interchangeable with Virginia.
How is it a flaw!? Building datacenters in different regions come with very different costs, and different costs to run. Power doesn't cost exactly the same in different regions. Local construction services are not priced exactly the same everywhere. Insurance, staff salaries, etc, etc... it all adds up, and it's not the same costs everywhere. It only makes sense that it would cost different amounts for the services run in different regions. Not sure how you're missing these easy to realize facts of life.
No, but it does reflect the dangers of incentivizing everyone to use a single region.
Most people (myself include) only choose it because its the cheapest. If multiple regions were the same price then there'd be less impact if one goes down.
The problems with us-east-1 have been apparent for a long time, many years. Once I started using us-east-1 long ago, and seeing the problems there, I moved everything to us-west-1 and stopped having those problems. EC2 instances were completely unreliable in us-east-1 (we were running hundreds to thousands at a time), not so in us-west-1. The error rates we were seeing were awful in us-east-1.
A negligible cost difference shouldn't matter when your apps are unstable due to the region being problematic.
1. The main one: it's the cheapest region, so when people select where to run their services they pick it because "why pay more?"
2. It's the default. Many tutorials and articles online show it in the examples, many deployment and other devops tools use it as a default value.
3. Related to n.2. AI models generate cloud configs and code examples with it unless asked otherwise.
4. It's location make it Europe-friendly, too. If you have a small service and you'd like to capture European and North American audience from a single location us-east-1 is a very good choice.
5. Many Amazon features are available in that region first and then spread out to other locations.
6. It's also a region where other cloud providers and hosting companies offer their services. Often there's space available in a data center not far from AWS-running racks. In hybrid cloud scenarios where you want to connect bits of your infrastructure running on AWS and on some physical hardware by a set of dedicated fiber optic lines us-east-1 is the place to do it.
7. Yes, for AWS deployments it's an experimental location that has higher risks of downtime compared to other regions, but in practice when a sizable part of us-east-1 is down other AWS services across the world tend to go down, too (along with half of the internet). So, is it really that risky to run over there, relatively speaking?
It's the world's default hosting location, and today's outages show it.