BTW, when I invest in a corporation, I do get double taxed. The profits are taxed at the highest possible income tax rate, then I pay 15% tax on the distribution of profits.
Of course if I work for that corporation, I opt to take the "profits" as a bonus. I pay all the taxes in that case, but at least there isn't double taxation.
That sentence makes no sense to people with no AWS experience. But if you give someone with Linux experience secure shell access to a DigitalOcean server they can hit the ground running.
It's not rocket science:
instance = virtual server ("droplet" in DO speak)
terminate = shut down
ephemeral store = local disk
An EC2 instance is just a virtual server so anyone who knows Linux, Windows, BSD or even Solaris can "hit the ground running" there too.
That being said, do they dump your instance if they reboot the physical server? I was under the impression that "Oh we want to upgrade they hypervisor kernel, your instance is toast", was fairgame/default on Amazon.
Nope. In most cases, you get two weeks warning before a physical host is decommissioned. I've gotten as little as 24 hours (guessing it was a more significant than usual hardware issue).
When that happens, you can just stop the instance, then start it again. That moves it onto a new physical host. If you don't do it in the 14 days, Amazon does it automatically. No loss of data, and just a few minutes of downtime if your startup scripts are OK.
Amazon should really advertise this, if that is the case. I was under the impression that Amazon couldn't be relied on as a VPS.
As I said above - the terminology can get hairy pretty fast. It's valuable to take stock of what you really need persisted, and what use can be made of 'scratch disks'. Local ephemerals are fast and cheap (included in the price of any instance). They come with the operational overhead of needing to rsync data off of them yourself if you want to retire that instance however.
For data that must be stored, I can use a EBS, or a database instance.
Like the grand-parent said, you pick what makes sense. Saying that ephemeral storage is a bad thing would be true if that were all they offered, but it isn't, and it ephemeral images are sometimes preferred.