Who would you be contentious with? I'm just telling you what Amazon says in their published docs. If you don't believe what they say, or if you think they could do it better you can bring it up with them, or start your own cloud service that does things "right".

But I can tell you that some use cases are perfect for Amazon's model of providing locally attached instance storage since I/O rates are much better than we can get with EBS volumes.

No, Amazon says that instance storage is directly attached to the host machine, so if they live-migrate a VM, they'd have to carry along the instance storage.

And there's no evidence that they use any type of shared SAN for instance storage -- instance storage only stays around for as long as the machine is running (or rebooted). If you stop the machine (as opposed to rebooting), or if Amazon has to migrate to a new physical host, you lose the instance store.

I can't think of a worse use for OCR software than for reporting. "Hey, why are all of the category zero items showing up under category O? And why were all of the accent marks turned into apostrophes?"

When the manager looks at an old PDF report a year from now, he knows that the numbers will be exactly the same as the last time he looked at it.

When he runs a new report for that time period, he has no such assurance that the numbers will be the same or even there at all. "Oh, we reclassified some of the expense categories last month, so the numbers are a little different" or "Oh yeah, when we migrated from the old database 6 months ago, and it was too hard to import some of the older data, so we left it out" or "Oh yeah, we decided that we only need to keep 9 months of historical data" or "Oh really? The numbers are different now? Maybe that's a bug, file a bug report and we'll bring it up with the vendor".

A screenshot of a report is a poor substitute for an Excel or PDF report where you can copy and paste the data.

I can believe it's "can not", since amazon provides gigabytes (or terabytes) of local instance storage for most of their instance types - that's a lot of data to live migrate. Even if the underlying Xen software technically *can* live migrate VM's, that doesn't mean their infrastructure can support migrating thousands of customer instances.

I think you meant "and charge customers for the much larger infrastructure required". Amazon is cheap, and they are clear that what you're buying from them is just a bunch of machines. If you want reliability, use multiple AZ's and regions. Some of their VM's come with a TB or more of instance storage, that's a lot of data to live-migrate when they want to reboot a physical host machine.

If you want live migration, check out Google Compute Engine, but if availability is important to you, you're better off architecting multiple machine redundancy than relying on a single long-lived machine since there are a lot more things than host maintenance that can trigger a crash and/or reboot of a VM.

There's no business tier small office internet that's going to give users the same uptime as a cheap VPS somewhere. No business that wants to maintain a 24x7 internet presence should be running their server on a small server in their closet.

Xen is software, not AWS, AWS is an entire infrastructure, and they can not (or will not) live migrate customer VM's.

They are very clear in their documentation that customers should be able to tolerate VM restarts and to use multiple AZ's and regions to help mitigate downtime. I have several hundred instances scheduled for reboot, but they are doing one AZ at a time.

AWS can't live migrate VM's.

If Amazon is collecting sales tax, it means that you were supposed to have already been paying the sales tax, and you're practicing tax evasion if you haven't paying sales or use tax on your purchases.

http://www.revenue.state.mn.us...

They can't, don't be stupid. If they apply a patch to increase the structural integrity field, that will negatively affect the battery life or they would have turned it up in the first place. Those force fields really eat into the battery life. The Apple Reality Distortion field is bad enough.

Even if I had ethernet to every room, I'd still want Wifi since the devices I use every day don't have ethernet ports, so there goes the security (though with careful network segmentation, I could keep the Wifi network separate from the wired network, but that sounds like a lot of work for a home network)

Wifi speeds keep moving forward, but are already fast enough that most home users wouldn't notice any difference between wireless and wired speeds. Though as frequencies increase, putting a Wifi node in each room might be neccessary.

Hence my question "What do you use it for", which you didn't really answer.

To be fair, with 12 bit words, that 16KW memory is bigger than it sounds. Probably more memory than any home computer needs anyway.

I live in a newish condo, built within the past 10 years, standard wood framed construction. I live in a 50 unit condo complex with a 60 unit apartment across the street, I can see dozens of my neighbor's SSID's, so it's not exactly an RF dead zone. (well, at least not in the 2.4Ghz band. Seems that AT&T is still issuing single band Wifi equipment since I see a lot of AT&T SSID's, but none in 5Ghz, I still get my own 5Ghz channel because 5Ghz is so rarely used around here)

I use an Asus RT-66U as my Wifi router, centrally located on the second floor, antennas rotated horizontally to try to maximize vertical radiation patterns to get more signal downstairs.