Hosting databases in clouds

rjha94 writes: "Cloud computing is the buzz of the day and our company is soon to join the fray. We are looking to host a very data centric application on Amazon EC2. However after my research I am really not convinced if EC2 or for that matter without guarantee of persistence machine images are the right places to host a database heavy application. Sure you have EBS and you have the promise of Async backups using duplicity to S3 but there is very little data about the performance and reliability. The only way of achieving scaling looks to be adding more nodes and that itself may not be a very optimal solution. I would like to ask the Slashdot readers their experience of hosting databases on clouds like EC2, GoGrid etc. and what really works in real life."