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Region selection

Before going live with Remotion Lambda, you need to think about into which AWS region you are deploying your function and bucket.

This document explains how to select a region and which considerations you need to make.

Available regions​

The following AWS regions are available:

  • eu-central-1
  • eu-west-1
  • eu-west-2
  • eu-west-3
  • eu-south-1
  • eu-north-1
  • us-east-1
  • us-east-2
  • us-west-1
  • us-west-2
  • af-south-1
  • ap-south-1
  • ap-east-1
  • ap-southeast-1
  • ap-southeast-2
  • ap-northeast-1
  • ap-northeast-2
  • ap-northeast-3
  • ca-central-1
  • me-south-1
  • sa-east-1

You can call getRegions() or type npx remotion lambda regions to get this list programmatically.

note

Support for regions eu-west-3, eu-south-1, eu-north-1, us-west-1, af-south-1, ap-east-1, ap-northeast-2, ap-northeast-3, ca-central-1, me-south-1, sa-east-1 has been added in v3.3.7.

Default region​

The default region is us-east-1.

Selecting a region​

There are 3 ways to select a region:

  • When using the Node.JS APIs, you have to pass the region explicitly to each function. Make sure your projects satisfy the Typescript types or follow the documentation.

  • When using the CLI, you can set the region using the REMOTION_AWS_REGION environment variable. It's best to put it in a .env file so you don't forget it sometimes.

info

The variable is called REMOTION_AWS_REGION because in Cloud providers like Vercel, AWS_REGION is a reserved environment variable name. However, Remotion does also accept the latter if you use it locally.

  • You can also pass the --region flag to all CLI commands to override the region. The flag takes precedence over the environment variable.
info

The REMOTION_AWS_REGION environment variable and --region flag do not have an effect when using the Node.JS APIs. You need to pass a region explicitly.

If you don't set a region, Remotion will use the default region.

Which region should I choose?​

Note that different regions have a different limit on how many Lambda functions can be started in a short amount of time ("burst limit").

  • us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1: Burst concurrency = 3000
  • ap-northeast-1, eu-central-1, us-east-2: Burst concurrency = 1000
  • All other regions = 500

Because of this, we recommend hosting your primary infrastructure in us-east-1, us-west-2 or eu-west-1 for maximum scalability.

Enabling regions in the AWS console​

Some regions that are supported by Remotion are not enabled by default in an AWS account. If you get a message:

The security token included in the request is invalid
The security token included in the request is invalid

see [here]

Other considerations​

  • The function and S3 bucket must be in the same region to eliminate latency across datacenters. Rendering with functions and buckets that have mismatching regions is not supported

  • You may deploy your whole architecture to different regions to further increase the amount of renders you can make concurrently. This has the advantage of higher redundancy, but a potential drawback of hitting a non-warm function.

  • Some regions are more expensive than others (for example af-south-1). Consult the Lambda Pricing page from AWS.

  • Some regions are disabled by default and you need to enable them in your AWS account before you can use them.