Amazon EC2: Persistent Storage

Amazon has just started a private beta program for a new persistent storage API in EC2. According to their documentation, they provide an API to create and manage volumes between 1GB and 1TB in size that behave like unformatted disks. Each volume is persistent and independent of EC2 instances and a single EC2 instance can mount multiple volumes. Their disks are supposed to be low-latency and high throughput with calls to store snapshots onto S3.

A lack of persistent storage has been the biggest challenge for developers as EC2 (in my experience) has rather high failure rates. With this persistent storage API (scheduled for public release later this year), Amazon has just made EC2 a dead-easy buy-in.