The EBSs we’ve ready about and certainly help, but our stumbling block was the server/app/IIS/SQL configuration not being persistent. Unless there was a way to store said configuration on the EBS volume (still researching that).

Also – it seems like it would be somewhat complicated to keep all the data updated across multiple servers since there is no shared volume. NFS is ok though I have run into problems with stale file handles and the lack of native windows support is somewhat lame. Backending storage on S3 sounds neat, but is more overhead than I would like, especially thinking about firing up a server and then needing to transfer all of those files down, every time a new server was fired up (imaging a scaling application cluster).

So, the jury is still out for us on EC2, but I’m very thankful for you helpful information along the way.