[tracker1]

What if your app was designed to work against AWS's data offerings, from RDS, S3, etc? Unless you're self-hosting your DB, concerns about persistence are less of an issue. Also worth considering if you are self-hosting is the replication/redundancy in the platform, you should be able to preserve-restart instances.

Me, I'd rather use what's available than self-host more often than not, but depends on the use-case.

[petemill]

Not sure I get what you're saying. NFS is not self-hosting. In fact, AWS has an NFS service called EFS (in preview).

[tracker1]

I meant writing your apps specifically against data services, not the filesystem directly.