You're reading a post titled “Amazon adds persistent storage to EC2” from the archives of Big Contrarian. It was originally published on April 14th, 2008 at 02:19 PM. If you enjoy it, you should subscribe to this site’s RSS feed, or its Twitter page.

Amazon adds persistent storage to EC2, solving one of the most glaring deficiencies with the service:

… our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.

While shared hosting is till a good deal cheaper than running an EC2 instance all month, an EC2 instance can be a good deal cheaper than using a dedicated server. With persistent storage, these instances become a viable option to calling up Rackspace. And while s3fs sort of solved this problem, it was always a slightly neat hack, with just enough weirdness to be unattractive to a certain class of applications and sites.

The cloud keeps getting more useful.

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