Amazon S3 is a stand alone service from Amazon Web Services to host file. It is powerful, but not it must not be confused with a content delivery network (CDN). AWS S3 has you pick a region, like us-west-1, eu-west-1, us-east-1 etc. Today us-east-1 went down, and a lot of apps couldn’t deliver content. Why is that? Well S3 is not a content delivery network, that means the files are retained in a single server location. To avoid this, Zesty.io uses CDN services like Akamai and Fastly that prevent our app from experiencing file outage issues from AWS when a region goes down.
We take uptime very seriously at Zesty.io, and we will always look for the best technologies and options to make uptime a #1 priority.
Amazon does however offer cross region replication, but it is not on by default and needs to be configured. So if you’re making an app that has global reach, consider using cross-region replication to avoid outages OR using a third party CDN service.