[watermelon0]

This was mostly applicable to older generations of EC2 instances (C3, M3, etc.)

EBS is now the default when creating an instance, and instance types of newer generations generally don't have instance store at all (except disk optimized instance types, and those with "d" in the name.)

[cookiecaper]

Yeah, I think Amazon gave up on trying to communicate the meaning of ephemeral storage, and I think that's for the best tbh. It's too easy to have important data vanish that way. Something as simple as someone issuing a shutdown from the console is translated into an "instance stop" in AWS, which would purge the storage -- unfortunately often a lesson learned the hard way.