[amazon-ec2] Benefits of EBS vs. instance-store (and vice-versa)

99% of our AWS setup is recyclable. So for me it doesn't really matter if I terminate an instance -- nothing is lost ever. E.g. my application is automatically deployed on an instance from SVN, our logs are written to a central syslog server.

The only benefit of instance storage that I see are cost-savings. Otherwise EBS-backed instances win. Eric mentioned all the advantages.


[2012-07-16] I would phrase this answer a lot different today.

I haven't had any good experience with EBS-backed instances in the past year or so. The last downtimes on AWS pretty much wrecked EBS as well.

I am guessing that a service like RDS uses some kind of EBS as well and that seems to work for the most part. On the instances we manage ourselves, we have got rid off EBS where possible.

Getting rid to an extend where we moved a database cluster back to iron (= real hardware). The only remaining piece in our infrastructure is a DB server where we stripe multiple EBS volumes into a software RAID and backup twice a day. Whatever would be lost in between backups, we can live with.

EBS is a somewhat flakey technology since it's essentially a network volume: a volume attached to your server from remote. I am not negating the work done with it – it is an amazing product since essentially unlimited persistent storage is just an API call away. But it's hardly fit for scenarios where I/O performance is key.

And in addition to how network storage behaves, all network is shared on EC2 instances. The smaller an instance (e.g. t1.micro, m1.small) the worse it gets because your network interfaces on the actual host system are shared among multiple VMs (= your EC2 instance) which run on top of it.

The larger instance you get, the better it gets of course. Better here means within reason.

When persistence is required, I would always advice people to use something like S3 to centralize between instances. S3 is a very stable service. Then automate your instance setup to a point where you can boot a new server and it gets ready by itself. Then there is no need to have network storage which lives longer than the instance.

So all in all, I see no benefit to EBS-backed instances what so ever. I rather add a minute to bootstrap, then run with a potential SPOF.

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