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Instance store is also immediately wiped when the instance is halted / restarted, which can theoretically happen at any time, for example by a mystery instance failure, or a patching tool that's helpfully restarting your boxes during offhours.



My understanding is this not true, only when the instance permanently fails and is moved.



Yeah, so restart does not.

Which means you can count on it about as much as a server of your own, if you could not repair the server.

I know a database company that uses instance storage as the primary storage. It’s common.


Wasn't aware, interesting. I did consider it in the past as well, but the reliability aspect made me consider this as a moonshot rather than anything practical. Kind of weirdly validating to know there are (supposedly) database providers using it.

That said, a good bit of our environments are scheduled, so it still wouldn't be an option there without hacks (e.g. doing a compressed blockwise dump before shutting down and then a blockwise flash on startup).


I would take a logical dump on shutdown and the restore that rather. You’d need a backup and restore process anyway, so that path has to exist either way. It’s kind of like a full vacuum, so has some benefits too.

The NDA prevents me from saying which database company, but it’s a major provider of cloud managed databases across clouds.




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