I agree. We run all of our MySQL and Mongo slave servers with local RAID-0 ephemeral storage. One dies? So what, we remove it from the pool and provision anot

I agree. We run all of our MySQL and Mongo slave servers with local RAID-0 ephemeral storage. One dies? So what, we remove it from the pool and provision another. Only our master and our slave backup server runs on EBS. We aren't as write oriented so we can live with some of the limitations of EBS, but we've even considered moving our master MySQL and Mongo servers to ephemeral storage and just relying on our slave back database server to run on EBS (for which we take freeze/snapshots of often). That server rarely ever falls more behind in relay updates.