Amazons EC2 service is, by all accounts, brillian. But one of the things that it lacks is any sort of assurance regarding data permanence. What I mean is each machine that you turn on has 160GB of storage, but if that server instance is ever shut off the data is *lost* (not corrubted byt GONE) and the next time you start that server instance it is back to the base image… you cannot save data on EC2 between reboots.

This is not an issue for everyone. But for people looking to run services on EC2 which require some sort of permanent storage solution (as in databases like MySQL or PotsgreSQL) this is a big show stopper. I’ll be putting some real thought in the next few days on how to sidestep this pitfall. I’m sure that it can be done, and I even have some ideas on how to do it. But I want to think them through and do a little research before I go blurting them out and making (more of) an ass out of myself 🙂

So… More on this later.

DK