People tend to make a habit of treating AWS like a VPS provider, in my experience. And you can skate by on this for a while, but it really isn't designed for that. And that will, eventually, lead to pain and suffering.
Sometimes instances just go out to lunch. Sometimes an AZ goes down. Chaos Monkey isn't just a good idea, it's required for reliable operation.
But please, please, if you are going to treat AWS like a VPS, at least don't do it in us-east-1! It seems to have more outages.
Our setup related to instances and EBS includes: At least 2 instances in different AZs, an ELB in front of them, a backup running at our hosting facility (though this could just be a different AWS zone, or different provider), and DNS with full-paper-path health checks that switch DNS over to the colo servers if any component of the primary fails.
Sometimes instances just go out to lunch. Sometimes an AZ goes down. Chaos Monkey isn't just a good idea, it's required for reliable operation.
But please, please, if you are going to treat AWS like a VPS, at least don't do it in us-east-1! It seems to have more outages.
Our setup related to instances and EBS includes: At least 2 instances in different AZs, an ELB in front of them, a backup running at our hosting facility (though this could just be a different AWS zone, or different provider), and DNS with full-paper-path health checks that switch DNS over to the colo servers if any component of the primary fails.