Consider the extreme case where your service is scattered over every AWS region: here an outage of any AWS region is guaranteed to take down your service.
Compare that to the case where your service is bound to only one region: then the odds of a single region outage taking down your entire service is reduced to 1 out of however many regions AWS has (assuming each region has an equal chance of suffering an outage).
To guard against outages, the failover service has to be scattered over entirely different regions (or, even better, on an entirely different service provider... which is probably a good idea anyway).
Agree. I think I should have suffixed a /s to my comment above.
> To guard against outages, the failover service has to be scattered over entirely different regions (or, even better, on an entirely different service provider... which is probably a good idea anyway).
Something, something... the greatest trick the devil (bigcloud) ever pulled...
There seem to have been multiple "full" outages in 2011-12 in AWS' us-east-1 region, which, granted, is the oldest AWS region and likely has a bunch of legacy stuff. By "full" outages I mean that a few core services fell over but the entire region become inaccessible due to those core failures.
Im forseeing a full downtime in Frankfurt this winter tho. Germany is in really bad position when it comes to electricity.