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Comment by alrs | Hacker News Reader

The ugly caveat isn't VPC, it's EBS.

This lands on the wrong side of pets-versus-cattle. AWS has been moving towards giving people what they want, but it's still best practice to use ephemeral storage and architect accordingly.

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> but it's still best practice to use ephemeral storage and architect accordingly

Its not worth the engineer time. Use EBS volumes, clean them up when they're no longer in use after termination. The only time you need local/ephemeral storage is swap or scratch space, or throughput you can't get from general or provisioned EBS.

Plus, you get auto recovery now without having to have architected for it ;)

After I say this, they'll probably have a huge EBS-caused outage, but it feels like EBS is much more capable now than it was even a year or two ago.

The General Purpose SSDs and the Provisioned IOPS have more than handled our performance concerns. Since that last awful multi-AZ outage a year or two ago, there hasn't been much to deal with for us.

EBS is great if it works for requirements, but unfortunately the maximum size of an EBS volume is limited to only 1 TB. With SSD instance storage you can get up to 6.4 TB.

Fortunately AWS is releasing 16TB volumes in the near future :)

If you've drunk the pets-vs-cattle koolaid to the point where your instances are all (or mostly) ephermal then you're probably also using auto-scaling groups and don't care if a particular single instance falls over.

    > If you've drunk the pets-vs-cattle koolaid

Generally drinking the kool-aid is a bad thing - any reason to favour pets?

Here is a fun story. Amazon's RDS services are backed by EBS. They also restart the instances automatically if they encounter issues.

But sure, "Best PracticesTM".

You're right, RDS is backed by EBS.

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