Decide on Primary AWS Region
While the company might operate in multiple regions, one region should be selected as the primary region. There are certain resources that will not be geographically distributed and these should be provisioned in this default region.
When starting from scratch with a new AWS account, it's a good time to revisit decisions that might have been made decades ago. There are many new AWS regions that might be better suited for the business.
Customer Proximity
One good option is picking a default region that is closest to the where the majority of end-users reside.
Business Headquarters
One good option is picking a default region that is closest to where the majority of business operations take place. This is especially true if most of the services in the default region will be consumed by the business itself.
Stability
When operating on AWS, selecting a region other than us-east-1 is advisable as this is the default region (or used to
be) for most AWS users. It has historically had the most service interruptions presumably because it is one of the most
heavily-used regions and operates at a scale much larger than other AWS regions. Therefor we advise using us-east-2
over us-east-1 and the latencies between these regions is very minimal.
High Availability / Availability Zones
Not all AWS regions support the same number of availability zones. Many regions only offer (2) availability zones when a minimum of (3) is recommended when operating kubernetes to avoid "split-brain" problems.
Cost
Not all regions cost the same to operate.
Service Availability
Not all regions offer the full suite of AWS services or receive new services at the same rate as others. Other times,
certain regions receive platform infrastructure updates slower than others. Also, recently AWS launched
Local Zones (e.g.
us-west-2-lax-1a) which operate a subset of AWS services.
Instance Types
Not all instance types are available in all regions
Latency
Latency between v1 infrastructure and v2 infrastructure could be a factor. See cloudping.co/grid for more information.