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If you're eschewing EBS because of past problems (like the Oct 2012 outage), you should be aware that RDS is EBS-backed [1].

Also, on EC2, EBS-backed instances boot faster [2]. Of course, you can (and should) still treat EBS-backed instances as expendable.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/#hardware-scaling

[2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Component...

Just to clarify: I don't eschew RDS because of outage issues, I use RDS because it's much easier to set up and manage compared to doing it yourself.

To be honest, I didn't know RDS was backed by EBS but it makes little real difference to me as long as the backup procedures are rock-solid and the performance is acceptable.

Sure - but I'm assuming RDS uses EBS under the covers...

I meant rather that is there any other option for persistent data on AWS?

As others pointed out, you use EBS then.