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That's true, but how many services get this right in practice? It's not easy to ensure all instances will perform well in case of failover. A lot of apps are running on a single instance and depend on Amazon's fairly good track record.

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Obviously these individuals have never visited the EC2 forums: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/search.jspa?objID=f30&q=unresp...

If you are relying on a single instance and depending on Amazon's track record, you're doing it wrong.

Do you have any actual sources of their average instance uptime over the year?

I see an SLA of 99.95%(~4hrs/year) on the site but cloudharmony.com/status has AWS at the top. Googling average ec2 uptime has people posting instances running for years with nothing.

I don't doubt that ec2 instances probably have good uptime on average. But instances can mysteriously disappear, that is a fact, and if you are on AWS you should plan for it. They give you all the tools you need for such planning.

Yes, clearly it's wrong, and I've had instances disappear myself. But it happens rarely enough, and some don't want the overhead of running another instance or ensuring an application has zero downtime. There is a large spectrum between having zero downtime and running a single-instance app on EC2.

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