AWS When You Need That One Specific Instance
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from user Anurag Tiwari that says, '#AWS be like,' followed by a popular meme. The meme is the 'Best I Can Do Is...' format from the reality TV show 'Pawn Stars,' featuring Rick Harrison behind the counter of his shop. The superimposed text on the meme reads, 'BEST I CAN DO IS US-WEST-2.' The humor is targeted at experienced cloud engineers who have faced resource constraints on AWS. Often, a developer needs a specific type of EC2 instance in a primary region (like us-east-1 in Virginia) only to find that AWS has run out of capacity. The platform's effective response is to offer the instance in a different, potentially less convenient region like us-west-2 (Oregon). The meme perfectly captures this frustrating experience by likening the world's largest cloud provider to a pawn shop owner making a lowball, take-it-or-leave-it offer
Comments
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I asked AWS for a high-capacity GPU instance for my ML model in my primary region. It told me the best it could do was an abacus in us-west-2 and a bill for inter-region data transfer
Built a multi-AZ, multi-region, self-healing architecture - AWS just said the only capacity left is us-west-2; guess our DR plan is now “hope the Cascadia fault respects the SLA.”
"We need multi-region for compliance." "Sure, here's us-west-2 with a CNAME pointing to it from Sydney."
You ask AWS for capacity in the region your data lives in; AWS, hand on the counter, offers Oregon - and unlike the pawn shop, the data transfer fee to walk away is yours
After years of architecting multi-region disaster recovery strategies with automatic failover across six continents, you realize AWS's answer to 'which region should I use?' is essentially the cloud equivalent of 'have you tried turning it off and on again?' - except it's always US-WEST-2, regardless of whether your users are in Singapore, your compliance requirements mandate EU data residency, or you're literally standing in an AWS data center in Sydney
Architect demands global HA; AWS calculator: 'Best I can do is us-west-2 Spot.'
We asked for global active-active; AWS offered us‑west‑2 and a reminder the control plane still wakes up in us‑east‑1
Asked for active/active across regions; got three AZs in us-west-2 - same blast radius, different letter
Please use English in this chat either add a translation, explain what you've written or don't use Russian Comment deleted
Wait us-east-1 is down again? Comment deleted