[garnaat]

There was a pretty lively exchange on twitter last night regarding this. I strongly disagree with the AWS forum poster. EBS does not suck. In fact, EBS and other services from AWS and Rackspace provide the building blocks to allow you to construct incredibly scalable, available systems.

However, you have to accept that when you use IaaS you are taking on some of the operational responsibility and you have to know what you are doing or find someone who does. If this user had been snapshotting regularly to S3, the worst thing they would have experienced is a couple of hours of downtime. All of their data would have been safe and easily recovered.

They didn't do that and the worst case scenario that AWS clearly describes in it's docs (failure of MULTIPLE devices) happened. And it will happen again, someday. Accept that and accept that failure is a feature when systems are designed properly.