> > IMHO the more you intertwine things you cannot be certain of because they operate outside of your particular VM's space with a process that relies on them the more you are risking finding out that your assumptions are wrong the hard way. You *shouldn't* get bit by this in a well-designed cloud or cluster system but that's not an acceptable word to describe the expected results when it's important. One needs to understand their technology stack. You need to know where your data is after a sync() call… is it cached in the controller, some other application layer, or safely on disk? You also need to understand the relationship between luns, volume managers, and filesystems and where your atomic operation are in your setup. i.e. If the filesystem spans multiple EBS volumes then you can’t use EBS snapshots otherwise you end up with a corrupted filesystem/database; however, if you use one filesystem per EBS volume then EBS snapshots work fine. Amazon’s own RDS service uses EBS snapshots for backups.
