Specialized cloud provider regions for availability-sensitive workloads

Abstract

Techniques are described that enable a cloud provider network to provide specialized regions that can be used to achieve greater availability assurance for workloads highly sensitive to downtime or outages. Cloud provider network users may use specialized regions to complement the use of provider network services offered in other geographic regions defined by the cloud provider network, either to host redundant computing resources or for failover purposes, where the operation of a specialized region is designed to provide additional resiliency against various types of correlated failures among the geographic regions. As one example, a cloud provider network may stage deployments of software updates to the web services provided by the cloud provider network in a manner that ensures that specialized regions receive such updates last and over a relatively long period of time, thereby helping to ensure that any software defects are detected in an earlier deployment of the update.