> Just never EBS. Ever. I wouldn't take it that far! There is conflicting information on which between Standard EBS and Instance store performs better but ther

> Just never EBS. Ever. I wouldn't take it that far! There is conflicting information on which between Standard EBS and Instance store performs better but there have been benchmarks to support that EBS does perform more consistently than instance store (example: http://serverfault.com/questions/111594/which-is-faster-for-read-access-on-ec2-local-drive-or-ebs http://serverfault.com/questions/111594/which-is-faster-for-...). Also, you can now launch EBS optimized instances which use a network stack intended to separate EBS I/O giving better throughput. iops is expensive but is great to have when you need it. Sure, if EBS goes down in your zone, you're hosed. But unless you're completely independent as a service, chances are you do depend on something which uses EBS so you might be hosed anyways. Instance store is great free storage to use. Since it needs to be mounted explicitly, I'm guessing that most people don't end up using it. Thats a shame too; so use that free storage but EBS isn't evil either.