[JoeH]

Here at RescueTime we use EC2 for all of our servers, with the exception of one server outside EC2 for monitoring.

All of our MySQL instances are currently each running on 4x EBS volumes using LVM stripped across all 4 volumes.

Our primary transactional table is nearing a billion rows, and just this weekend we performed a migration that segmented this table into 40 partitions, containing data back to 2007.

We are currently handling roughly 3,000,000 inserts and 2,500,000 updates on this one table daily. IOWait on our DB holds steady at about 5% throughout our peak (5am - 4pm PST).

It is certainly not Fibre Channel backboned speeds, but the other benefits of using EBS CURRENTLY outweighs any IO performance hits we might have. The ability to backup production and refresh any of our other DB environments in less than 15 minutes, using EBS snapshots is worth it. Especially for the price we pay monthly for this infrastructure.

If you need any more details on our setup or tips in troubleshooting/setting up your own, feel free to ping me.