Ben Thompson talking about origins of the US-East-1, the AWS region that went down a couple of days back and along with it a significant portion of the internet.
Northern Virginia was a place that, in the 1990s, had relatively cheap and reliable power, land, and a fairly benign natural-disaster profile; it also had one of the first major Internet exchange points, thanks to its proximity to Washington D.C., and was centrally located between the west coast and Europe. That drew AOL, the largest Internet Service Provider of the 1990s, which established the region as data center central, leading to an even larger buildout of critical infrastructure, and making it the obvious location to place AWS’s first data center in 2006.
That data center became what is known as US-East-1, and from the beginning it has been the location with the most capacity, the widest variety of instance types, and the first region to get AWS’s newest features. It’s so critical that AWS itself has repeatedly been shown to have dependencies on US-East-1; it’s also the default location in tutorials and templates used by developers around the world.
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