[jjm]

I do not believe you could be effective by moving away from EBS, you know without giving up quite a bit.

Doing things the right way with EC2 means using EBS. It's the brake caliper to the rotor. Sure you could have drum brakes but they're not nearly anywhere effective as they quickly get heat soaked. I'm referring to S3.

One should trust ephemeral storage. Your instance can go down at anytime. Write speeds to S3 are not nearly as fast as ephemeral or EBS arrays (raid).

Hate to say it, but If one cannot trust EBS then what the heck are 'we' doing on EC2... EBS quality should be priority one, otherwise we're all building Skyscrapers on foam foundations of candy cane rebar.

[joshhart]

I can't say whether much has changed within the last year, but when I worked at FathomDB we had serious issues with EBS. You couldn't trust it. Odd things would happen like disks getting stuck in a reattaching state for days and disks having poor performance.