As you say, the real trouble with EBS is when serving application data. We run a lot of databases, and EBS was just not good enough for them even when there wer

As you say, the real trouble with EBS is when serving application data. We run a lot of databases, and EBS was just not good enough for them even when there were no system-wide issues. Our problem with EBS as a boot device was that occasional system logs, etc. would go it, and when EBS was down the inability to reach the disk (the block-store abstraction problem) would lock up the whole OS.