No, I'm pretty sure this has always been the case. Some early adopters lost data when it was on local volumes and not backed up, and everybody who paid attention learned from the public post mortems.

Separately, even hardware you own and operate is ephemeral. You never know when the disk, PSU, or cooling fan will kick the bucket and the host wedges one way or another.

If you want the illusion of permanence, VMWare had a solution for you ... for a price you're not gonna like!

I wish it wasn't true. On all the occasions, I was told that there was "an issue with the underlying hardware".

Yes, this happens sometimes with AWS. We're heavy users and have had to respawn instances on several different occasions due to unexpected issues with the underlying hardware. Only once or twice has AWS told us they're moving us because of that, but we've noticed performance issues that after troubleshooting with support, could only be described as a symptom of the hardware.

Everyone should have backups and a plan in place to recover when a node goes offline, but this isn't exclusive to AWS or cloud in general. A robust infrastructure will have failovers standing by and accept the possibility that any one machine could die at any moment. Shouldn't have any single points of failure, as colocated hardware kicks the bucket unexpectedly sometimes too.

It is worth noting that "the cloud" is synonymous with "someone else's computer"

> It is worth noting that "the cloud" is synonymous with "someone else's computer"

Well, no, its not, otherwise "private cloud" would be incoherent.

Sure, but that's very different than them being intended as ephemeral.

Yes, yes you did. Sargun posted: "EC2 instances are meant to be ephemeral" to which bpicolo replied: "That doesn't sound factual at all." You then replied with: "I wish it wasn't true."

_it_ in this case refers to the ephemeral state of EC2 instances. You literally did suggest they were ephemeral.