Er, RDS is (a) SQL (b) backed by EBS.
Re:Fixing holes in EC2 reliability
by brettweaverio on Saturday December 31, 2011 @01:42AM
(#3410360)
Understood, however AWS manages the association to block level storage, as well as the performance tuning. You can still operate with ephemeral compute decoupled from storage.
That being said, all apps are different and some may need block storage. I'm not saying it should not be used, however when making that decision the relation and hard dependencies created should be understood.