Amazon adds persistent storage to EC2 »
Amazon is adding persistent storage as an option to EC2 — currently it’s in private beta.
Previously, disk storage on an EC2 was transient:- when the machine was shut down or crashed, it felt like a hard drive crash. (And you’d lose your IP address too, but Amazon added static IPs a little while ago too.) The path to reliability was to use S3, but that can’t be mounted as a native file system.
The persistent storage appears as a raw, mountable filesystem that needs to be formatted. You’ll be able to make a quick snapshot of the data, for backup. No word on pricing or its performance, but you’d expect it to be aligned with S3.
There’s been the option of mounting S3 in EC2 using davfs, which mounts with WebDAV, but that’s a bit of a hack and one wonders what the performance would be like.