To prevent the effect of people picking the first zone in the list to launch resources into
Yeah. There is an api call that shows the mapping between a region's az names and the static az id's. I wasn't an early adopter but encountered the random az assignment in 2010.
Been like this for the longest time.
Makes sense but a real PITA when using a lot of AWS accounts in an org.
In hindsight they should have assigned AZ identifiers to something less sequential.
Instead of
eu-east-1, eu-east-2, eu-east-3
Do something like
eu-east-s, eu-east-k, eu-east-p
where the suffixes are the same for everyone. Less bias to choosing -1 then.