S3 is not globally distributed. Each region is fully independent of each other. If Virgina is nuked, you lose anything in us-east-1. I’ve confirmed this with AWS staff because of a prior HN discussion :)
The ease through which Amazon provides the ability to architect incredibly globally redundant applications is unmatched. But your business probably can’t afford to implement at that scale, Amazon or otherwise (geographically load balanced DNS, multiple primary databases across regions and their associated followers, replicating S3 objects from all primary region buckets to secondary regions, instances for each application running multi-AZ in multiple regions, etc).
The ease through which Amazon provides the ability to architect incredibly globally redundant applications is unmatched. But your business probably can’t afford to implement at that scale, Amazon or otherwise (geographically load balanced DNS, multiple primary databases across regions and their associated followers, replicating S3 objects from all primary region buckets to secondary regions, instances for each application running multi-AZ in multiple regions, etc).