[solatic]

> If your application can't handle a normal system shutdown without losing data, your application is at fault, not your system setup.

Unless something in the system shutdown fails to give the application what it needs (for instance, time) to shutdown cleanly. Which is entirely possible considering that Amazon is selling you the spot instance on the given assumption that it can give the hardware at any time to somebody who is willing to pay more. Amazon does not guarantee the time needed for a clean shutdown (only that a two-minute warning will be available via their proprietary mechanism, if you architect your application to monitor for it) for a spot instance anywhere in their documentation, and you would be ill-advised to not architect for that.

> Storing your important spot instance data on EBS is recommended by AWS

Because EBS itself is reasonably reliable. If you have configuration data (i.e. in /etc) for a legacy application that isn't managed, it's reasonable to mount that data on EBS since it's rarely written to and writes are generally human-initiated and human-monitored (with operations policy possibly mandating a snapshot even before any changes are made).

That's still very different from daemon writes to /var. Take for instance, the PostgreSQL documentation which warns that snapshots must include WAL logs in order for the snapshot to be recoverable, and that it is quite difficult to restore from a snapshot if you stored your WAL logs on a different mount: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/backup-file.html

You need to understand precisely how your application is treating your storage and act accordingly. Thinking that all applications interact with storage the same way is dangerous and liable to cause data corruption and loss. That's all.