Are there any known differences between the different US East availability zones? I've noticed 1e is new on the list. Does that mean that the underlying hardware is newer and the EC2 instances potentially have better performance?
It seems that I lock myself into a particular AZ when creating EBS volumes so I wanted to know if there's any "inside knowledge" that might help my decision.
Availability zone identifiers (us-east-1a, us-east-1b, etc.) are different for every account. So us-east-1e may not be the same as us-east-1e for someone else.
I think part of the reason for this is to avoid situations just like this: certain AZ's getting bad (or good) reputations and having people flock away (or toward) certain AZ's.