Multi-region is difficult and expensive, and a lot of projects aren't that important. Most of our infrastructure just isn't that vital; we'd rather take the occasional outage than spend the time and money implementing the sort of active-active multi-region infrastructure that a "correct" implementation would use. We took the recent 8 hour us-east-1 outage on the nose and have not reconsidered this plan. It was a calculated risk that we still believe we're on the right side of. Multi-AZ but single-region is a reasonable balance of cost, difficulty, and reliability for us.

Curios if you tell your customers you’re totally ok with having lower than 99.9 availability

We don't have any external customers; they are all internal. We're all on the same side of the table.

Sounds like even worse deal for the customer since there is no refund

Depends on the service are

I have some services which can cope with a 98.5% downtime, as long as they are available the specific 1.5% of the time we need them to run, as such "the cloud" is useless for that service

Right when you really want your thing to be up and can’t amortize hours of continuous downtime cloud has no solution for this. That’s something that often gets left out from the sales pitches tho =)

How many 9s can you get from a single-region multi-AZ deployment not on us-east-1 and which nly uses basic services (EC2, IAM, S3, DynamoDB, etc)?

Really only 3?

Depends on how critical they are to your stack. Ime if you use more than a few products and either one of them can take you down yeah it’s less than 3. Just something to ponder but if s3 didn’t meet 99.9 for the month you get a whopping 10% back. Other cloud vendors aren’t much better at this (actually worse). Not even to mention that you need to leave some room for your own fuckups

IDK, don't you end up with a bunch of extra costs? Like you're going to literally pay more money because now you have cross region replication charges, and then you're going to pay a latency cost, and then you may end up needing to overprovision your compute, etc.

All to go from, idk, 99.9% uptime to 99.95% (throwing out these numbers)? The thing is when AWS goes down so much of the internet goes down that companies don't really get called out individually.

If you just sat that there and took that 8 hour outage you’re barely even 99.9 for the year

You're saying that as if it's a walk in the park to set up and not cost prohibitive, in terms of opportunity cost and budget, especially for smaller companies.

Right. Downtime (or perception of downtime) is bad for business, so AWS is surely working to improve reliability to avoid more black eyes on their uptime. But at the same time, an AWS customer might be considering multi-region functionality in AWS to protect themselves ... from AWS making a mistake.

As a customer, it's unclear what the right approach is. Invest more with your vendor who caused the problem in the first place, or trust that they'll improve uptime?

This might be a multi-region problem. Auth0 as an example has three US regions and two of them are down.