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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 of selection 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

Go to the AWS console, click on your name, then click Account and enable the regions that you would like to use.

Other considerations​

  • The function and S3 bucket must be in the same region to eliminate latency across datacenters. Rendering with functions and buckets that ahave 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. The tradeoff is higher redundancy, and not being able to benefit less from already warm functions.

  • 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.