EC2 isn't enterprise hardware, it's all commodity and, more lately, custom-designed silicon. It certainly fails, and Amazon's own recommendations call for redu

EC2 isn't enterprise hardware, it's all commodity and, more lately, custom-designed silicon. It certainly fails, and Amazon's own recommendations call for redundancy using things like EC2 auto-scaling groups and RDS multi-AZ. EC2 has a slight leg up because EBS stores data redundantly, so a single disk failure won't knock out your data. But failure is still possible, and a durable storage strategy should involve backups.