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The most recent "general purpose" instance families (C4, G3, M4, P2, R4) don't offer ephemeral storage anymore. My guess is that AWS will only offer ephemeral storage for a few selected instance families in future.

So you have to decide: older instance types (which will become more expensive as they usually don't benefit from new price reductions) or no ephemeral storage

We do this for our CI and it works well; we use I3 (spot) instances, introduced earlier this year, which have large amounts of NVMe instance storage. It is essential to push everything you want to keep to S3, ECR, etc so it won't work for every case, but I'd recommend it if possible. And of course, if the instance does go down, your Docker cache goes with it so you'll suffer slow builds while it warms up.

The I3 instances are pricey, but if you can suffer possible CI outages and everything is self-healing, they're extremely cheap as spot instances.

Good point, but they may be caching or storing results on the volume