Also, 10 times more reliable than a hard drive is pretty good. For me, the takeaway is that I should treat this as a hard drive and NOT as a magical solution that allows me to ignore everything I have learned about systems administration.

Babysitting servers at 2AM really drives home lessons for me and the urge to simply declare those problems moot is strong--but would be a mistake.

Which is fine to want.

The EBS failure rate is 0.1-0.5% annually. That's awesome. At 0.1%, the disk is likely (mean time to failure) to fail in 500 years on average. At 0.5%, it is likely to fail in 100 years on average. At either point, I'm more than comfortable. I can snapshot the drive daily/weekly/monthly and when you combine the snapshots as a backup with the likelyhood of failure in any given year being so low, I can rest easy.

Compare that with commercial drives which are likely to fail in a decade give or take. . . Well, I know where I'd rather have my data.

Getting back to the original poster, (s)he wants a system that takes care of the snapshots without intervention. So, package up EBS along with auto-snapshotting with an SLA saying that you won't loose more than a day of data and you have a business. You charge a premium because unlike EBS, you're reliable. All the while, you are just EBS with S3 - something that the individual could do themselves. EBS is unlikely to ever fail for your clients since I'm guessing no one is going to have a client for 100 years and even if that happens, you just restore one of the daily snapshots. Nice! You've lived up to your SLA while getting paid!

Think about it, the backups aren't where the cost is. 1000 PUT requests with 4MB chunks means 4GB is backed up for a penny there in terms of the number of requests. Data transfer from EC2 to S3 is free. So, those aren't the costs. As long as you can consolidate the delta backups so you aren't storing a version for every day since inception, I don't see why this service couldn't be offered for 2x the cost of EBS.

However, saying "yep, your storage space is now dead and you have lost all your files stored there" is not something I feel comfortable with. Why not offer something more resilient?

Probably you could combine several of these "drives" for more resilience?

Why force that added expense on people that don't want it? Some people might be using the disk as temporary storage, or something.

Anyway, you can easily back up to S3... so everyone gets what they want.

Unless you're mirroring your data across multiple drives, there is no way ZFS can magically recreate a volume that simply ceases to exist. Think of it this way: how would ZFS help you in your own server room if a non-mirrored disk caught fire and melted? Answer: it wouldn't. You'd go to backups, like you would with any other filesystem.

Nuh-uh! ZFS is magical and not bounded by the "laws of reality". After all, Apple said they liked it!