us-east-2 (Ohio) and eu-west-1 (Dublin) are my go-to regions. Prices are the same and most new services (and new features) are almost always ready to go on launch days.
[0] https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/at-scale-rare-even...
As a user of us-west-2, I've found it to be very reliable. I can only remember a couple minor issues off the top of my head. The region hasn't even made the leaderboard. [1] ;)
Every time us-east-1 goes haywire, I can kick my feet up and relax as the world burns.
Every AWS service can decide their deployment strategy on their own - there is no mandate on which region gets updates first. And starting in smaller regions is recommended.
The intent of this post was mainly to counter the arguments I was seeing online that dismissed multi-region setups as a way to guard against AWS outages because "it's too hard." I merely wanted to point out there is a way to do it without it being super complicated, or super expensive. There seems to be a trend to build super fancy architectures and as a whole, many people have neglected the simple "good enough" options.
I think having a database replicated to 2 regions and load balance all traffic to both region has a big impact on performance and read after write consistency The solution is what the last option suggests; the second region is prepared as a fallback solution only and not as a live solution. This way, you accept that you will still have some downtime and maybe some data loss too whenever a failover takes places. But this is much better than going down for hours, and is much better than having 2 regions in Active-Active mode where your system will suffer from performance and data consistency So accept you will have failures, work on the better solution. The perfect solution does not exist. There is no 100%
Region rollover is not possible with Cognito. I believe you could backup the user pool to a different region, but users would still need to reset their passwords which would open another can of worms when you switch back to the original pool.
My advice is: have a well designed architecture in a single region with multiple AZ and you will cover most problems.
Being in multiple AZs alone seems to be insufficient more and more. So the point was that by at least pushing backups or replicas into another region, you have options to restore from them.
