Very nice, thank you. Mostly all of this is good advice and correlates nicely with my experience.
One thing though:
"EBS volumes and Software RAID is best but scary on AWS"
I've managed an EBS RAID10 database for a few years now. I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole.
Do yourself a favor, set up an m1.xlarge (or bigger) instance, put the ephemeral drives in a RAID0 and mirror across multiple machines using hot-standby, slony, londiste, or some other tool. You'll be much happier, your system will perform much better, and you'll have a failover strategy in place.
One thing though:
"EBS volumes and Software RAID is best but scary on AWS"
I've managed an EBS RAID10 database for a few years now. I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole.
Do yourself a favor, set up an m1.xlarge (or bigger) instance, put the ephemeral drives in a RAID0 and mirror across multiple machines using hot-standby, slony, londiste, or some other tool. You'll be much happier, your system will perform much better, and you'll have a failover strategy in place.