Do you have a source detailing this issue in us-east-1? I don't see a recent post-event summary from AWS mentioning us-east-1 https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/pes/
[01:30 PM PDT] At 4:33 AM PDT one of ten data centers in one of the six Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Region saw a failure of utility power. Our backup generators came online immediately but began failing at around 6:00 AM PDT. This impacted 7.5% of EC2 instances and EBS volumes in the Availability Zone. Power was fully restored to the impacted data center at 7:45 AM PDT. By 10:45 AM PDT, all but 1% of instances had been recovered, and by 12:30 PM PDT only 0.5% of instances remained impaired. Since the beginning of the impact, we have been working to recover the remaining instances and volumes. A small number of remaining instances and volumes are hosted on hardware which was adversely affected by the loss of power. We continue to work to recover all affected instances and volumes and will be communicating to the remaining impacted customers via the Personal Health Dashboard. For immediate recovery, we recommend replacing any remaining affected instances or volumes if possible.
HA would normally use two AZs, 21C architectures would use three AZs, and other patterns such as pilot light let you use additional AZs without a significant cost hit. Further, when you can make workload-handling instances so much smaller (even down into the T sizes, and with cattle patterns you can start to leverage spot pricing), each additional AZ you add to the 21C mix represents a smaller percentage of your capacity lost in an AZ outage.
What factors have you choosing an automation powered CSP such as AWS but using only a single AZ out of a half dozen?
If using a single AZ and tense during outages, why not use Hetzner, Softlayer (now IBM Cloud), etc.?
Either way, GP is using obscure terminology at best.
> The term pilot light is often used to describe a DR scenario in which a minimal version of an environment is always running in the cloud. The idea of the pilot light is an analogy that comes from the gas heater. In a gas heater, a small flame that’s always on can quickly ignite the entire furnace to heat up a house
Sure, I’m being nitpicky, but that’s a terrible explanation of the purpose of a pilot light in a legacy furnace.