Key line of the article: “Since Netflix focuses on making sure services can handle individual instance failure and since we avoid using EBS for data persistence, we still did not see any impact to our service.”
As an architecture design, the choice to avoid EBS is hotly debated, though many high-profile systems besides NetFlix (SimpleGeo, Sprint.ly) have moved almost exclusively to EC2 instance-backed (local disk) VMs and as a result, avoided the pain of the last 3 major AWS outages.
As an architecture design, the choice to avoid EBS is hotly debated, though many high-profile systems besides NetFlix (SimpleGeo, Sprint.ly) have moved almost exclusively to EC2 instance-backed (local disk) VMs and as a result, avoided the pain of the last 3 major AWS outages.