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Is that material to a conversation about service uptime of existing resources, though? Are there customers out there that are churning through the full lifecycle of ephemeral EC2 instances as part of their day-to-day?

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any company of non trivial scale will surely launch ec2 nodes during the day

one of the main points of cloud computing is scaling up and down frequently

We spend ~$20,000 per month in AWS for the product I work on. In the average day we do not launch an EC2 instance. We do not do any dynamic scaling. However, there are many scenarios (especially during outages and such) that it would be critical for us to be able to launch a new instance (and or stop/start an existing instance.)

I understand scaling. I’m saying there is a difference in severity of several orders of magnitude between “the computers are down” and “we can’t add additional computers”.

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