EBS has its problems, but I think a blanket rejection of EBS is probably unwarranted. It's true that in 2011, EBS was very shaky. Amazon has since invested quit

EBS has its problems, but I think a blanket rejection of EBS is probably unwarranted. It's true that in 2011, EBS was very shaky. Amazon has since invested quite a bit of energy into EBS; at that time it was a new service that couldn't handle its own growth. EBS has become substantially more reliable, both in terms of availability and performance consistency (provisioned IOPS). That doesn't mean you should rely on it absolutely, at least within a single AZ. Multi-AZ is a critical part of any AWS deployment at scale, if not multi-region (depending on your needs). EBS is not a cure-all, either; if you have higher performance demands than it offers (between provisioned IOPS and IO-optimized instances) then that's fine, just measure first. Finally, I'd like to point out that Reddit's complaints about EBS aren't the best to echo as an example of EBS issues: first, they are a few years old, and at the time both Reddit and EBS were architected with substantial deficiencies.