AMIs definitely aren't for storing highly variable data. I use AMIs in two ways: 1) I create a base AMI for each group of my servers that have similar environm

AMIs definitely aren't for storing highly variable data. I use AMIs in two ways: 1) I create a base AMI for each group of my servers that have similar environments. For example, I may have a base image v1.3 for general wordpress sites, or v1.1 for rails + redis. By doing this, I greatly reduce the amount of manual setup when I want to load a new server, and I know that when my server is up, it has all the tools and configurations that I need in order to just start deploying my code. 2) I create nightly snapshots of all of my attached volumes and also create a backup AMI of all of my current servers. These are ONLY for recovering servers that are not changing minute-by-minute, or for easily rolling back if something terrible happens and I just need to start fresh. You can use an Ec2 + an AMI + an EBS volume for whatever you'd like, including a database. If the server goes down, you will not lose a thing, since your EBS persists. You also don't have to manually mount/unmount - that's all taken care of for you automatically. There have been some rare issues in the past with EBS volumes dying, so for critical data, I would definitely consider some sort of replication.