I think this provides a lower level mechanism for managing nodes. Both ELB and RDS use EBS and have been hit in the past by the knock on effects of EBS outages

I think this provides a lower level mechanism for managing nodes. Both ELB and RDS use EBS and have been hit in the past by the knock on effects of EBS outages. I think this makes it easier to manage your own load balancers using instance storage without EBS.