According to the Amazon EC2 FAQ, when an instance is terminated the data is gone. What steps can I take to preserve data in the event my instance is rebooted? I've been looking into EBS and S3 – would either of these be useful to store an active database? How often are instances rebooted anyways?
Amazon EC2 Data Persistence
amazon ec2amazon-ebs
Best Answer
Like others have said, EBS--Elastic Block Storage. I am using it myself now that it is released to the general public. It is better than S3 on multiple points:
My experience with EBS so far has been the most positive thing about AWS I've dealt with to date.
Update: While my experience with EBS has been positive, others have had issues. Very specifically EBS do not implement fsync() correctly. Ted Dziuba has some interesting words about this in his blog post Amazon — The Purpose of Pain: Myth 2: Architecture Will Save You from Cloud Failures