Re:No persistent storage; not great value (Score 1)

I would tend to agree about the value Issue. Please tell if I am misunderstanding there pricing, but from what I see for $.80 / hr you get a box with 8 "EC2 Compute Units". They specify that a Compute Unit " provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor." This seems insane, for this XL instance I would be paying $576 / month for. I can lease a box with 2x the CPU power (8, 2.83 cores) for $274 / month. Now, peak capacity ... you don't have all the instances running at once I get, but Powering up a new master "on demand" is not a simple task with a decently sized dataset. So, I guess for EC2 to be valuable 2 things need to be true for you. You must have a spike that is high enough from your norm to justify those prices, and you have to have an app that is easy to "shard" into small ephemeral pieces. Do not underestimate how hard the ladder can be, doing this with a DB that has a large data set is not trivial. In addition, there tend to be a lot of things you can be doing during periods where you have the capacity, IE: you know basic sales stats, but what about all the complicated relationship that are too expensive to calculate live ? Are they running at night or whenever you idle time is ?