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I don't care about disk speed nearly as much as I do reliability. EBS combines inconsistency with unreliability. It is the worst of both worlds for building a reliable, redundant infrastructure. I'm pretty bummed.

I presume they will add storage optimized instances with local disks in the future?

I guess so.

Last time we spec-ed up an ElasticSearch cluster the SSD EBS didn't exist yet, so on-board SSDs was an obvious win.

I should revisit it again some time.

SSD instance storage will always be significantly faster than EBS storage, even if SSD-backed. I'm disappointed that Amazon dropped it from their C4 offering.

For Elasticsearch, we use R3 (memory-optimized) instances which still have SSD instance storage. And boy is it ever fast.

I'm considering switching to these from C3 and it would be interesting to see hdparm outputs / etc on these if anyone is going to try them.

Onboard SSDs are better for some use cases... high volume queues come to mind.

C3 SSDs were crazy faster than even the fastest EBS option listed, plus you could raid0 them...

Fortunately for me, I don't need that much disk space and C3's aren't going anywhere for a while.