EC2 upgrades again

At lunch today, I read that EC2 can now boot off EBS images, something that simplifies the whole AMI thing and brings it up to speed with Rackspace on the ease-of-deployment front. However, two points:

1. EC2 is still the clear loser in price-performance, and charging for I/O to the root partition won't help. More specifically, when will EBS I/O become consistent? Probably this has a lot to do with being popular and dealing with shared resources at the lower end, see this HN thread.
2. My next question is, how does this affect the attack surface of EC2? Can the work done in the "Get off my Cloud!" paper be expanded on?

Anyway, this makes my Postgres stuff interesting, guess I'll be using this new mechanism instead. It's always nice when new stuff arrives, even if it means reworking stuff.

EC2: now having actually played with it a *little*...

So, in place of my previous bloviation on the subject, unfettered by the weight of experience, a couple of somewhat-more-tempered comments follow:

• Using the command-line tools is slow. They're shifting gigs of data around at the touch of a button, but hey, it's a UX thing.
• In terms of actual tools, the options seem to be:
  • Go with the command-line tools and a bunch of bash scripts
  • Go with a (generally) half-baked third-party API, with its own idiosyncrasies built in, and the traditional lack of documentation OSS projects feel they can get away with.
    
  • (My inevitable option) download the WSDLs & use something to generate your own API in whatever language. Regenerate it whenever the API changes.
• This choice is especially acute since I'm not intending, ultimately, to have to do anything by hand - so programming things properly to start with seems like the only sensible option.
  
• Consistent IO on EBS is apparently not an option. This is something I think Amazon should fix toute suite, because things like RackSpace (maybe) and NewServers (h.t. etbe) seem to be to stomping all over the EBS I/O figures. In a different context, James Hamilton says "it makes no sense to allow a lower cost component impose constraints on the optimization of a higher cost component", and assuming that the servers are the expensive part, this is what (IMHO) may make using RDBMSs on EC2 a bit of a PIA long-term.