msolson

Ah yes. Instance store root volumes are what we originally launched EC2 with--EBS came along 2 years later, but as data volumes only at first, with boot from EBS I think a year after that. There's a lot less fragility, and really it's just easier for our customers to create an EBS snapshot based AMI.

Before we launched the c4 instance family the vast majority of instance launches were from EBS backed AMIs, so we decided to remove a pile of complexity, and beginning with the c4 instance family, we stopped supporting instance storage root volumes on new instance families.

At least in the organizations I'm a part of this isn't true. We do look for both specialists and generalists, and focus on experience and how it could apply.

It's difficult to innovate by just repeating what's been done before. But everything you learn along the way helps shape that innovation.

Instance storage can be a good option depending on your workload, but definitely has limitations. There's huge value in separating the lifecycle of storage from compute, and EBS provides higher durability than instance storage as well.

There are no operating system limitations that I'm aware of, however. I was just able to launch a Windows m6idn.2xlarge to verify.

A picture can be worth way more than a thousand words, but sometimes you have to iterate through a thousand pictures to find the one that tells the right story, or helps you ask the right question!

Thanks for the comment, and you're right, modern computers do have a much better architecture! As I was laying out the story I was thinking about what it looked like when we started. I'll clarify that in the image caption that it's from that era.