[wanorris]

"But the good thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on their platform."

Once you have mountable volumes, you can pretty much run the LAMP-style stack of your choice unmodified, right?

[LogicHoleFlaw]

Pretty much. You essentially get your persistent read-write /var filesystem. You can keep the read-only parts of your system in your boot image. Unix has a long heritage of working in such an environment. It's a natural fit.