Well, they still have the instance types where instance storage matters most, IMO: d2 and i2 (which are great for running things like Cassandra and HDFS). Also

Well, they still have the instance types where instance storage matters most, IMO: d2 and i2 (which are great for running things like Cassandra and HDFS). Also, complementing toomuchtodo's comment, there's also now EBS types focused on almost all kinds of workloads: sc1 for cold data/archiving, st1 for workloads optimized for sequential scans (a Confluent benchmark even reported that Kafka ran better with st1 EBS than instance storage), io1/PIOPS for databases and gp2 for everything else.