re: #3 - My tests show that the virtual NIC can only handle about 100k packets/sec. I don't have the results of my tests up anywhere, but Rightscale confirms th

re: #3 - My tests show that the virtual NIC can only handle about 100k packets/sec. I don't have the results of my tests up anywhere, but Rightscale confirms this in their tests as well: http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/04/01/benchmarking-load-balancers-in-the-cloud/ http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/04/01/benchmarking-load-bala... So I'd say YES, other workloads would be affected during heavy EBS I/O, though I've never tested/measured this specific case.