Can you attach Amazon EBS to multiple instances?
We currently use multiple webservers accessing one mysql server and fileserver. Looking at moving to the cloud, can I use this same setup and attach the EBS to multiple machine instances or what's another solution?
Answer
UPDATE (April 2015): For this use-case, you should start looking at the new Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), which is designed to be multiply attached in exactly the way you are wanting. The key difference between EFS and EBS is that they provide different abstractions: EFS exposes the NFSv4 protocol, whereas EBS provides raw block IO access.
Below you'll find my original explanation as to why it's not possible to safely mount a raw block device on multiple machines.
ORIGINAL POST (2011):
Even if you were able to get an EBS volume attached to more than one instance, it would be a _REALLY_BAD_IDEA_. To quote Kekoa, "this is like using a hard drive in two computers at once"
Why is this a bad idea? ... The reason you can't attach a volume to more than one instance is that EBS provides a "block storage" abstraction upon which customers run a filesystem like ext2/ext3/etc. Most of these filesystems (eg, ext2/3, FAT, NTFS, etc) are written assuming they have exclusive access to the block device. Two instances accessing the same filesystem would almost certainly end in tears and data corruption.
In other words, double mounting an EBS volume would only work if you were running a cluster filesystem that is designed to share a block device between multiple machines. Furthermore, even this wouldn't be enough. EBS would need to be tested for this scenario and to ensure that it provides the same consistency guarantees as other shared block device solutions ... ie, that blocks aren't cached at intermediate non-shared levels like the Dom0 kernel, Xen layer, and DomU kernel. And then there's the performance considerations of synchronizing blocks between multiple clients - most of the clustered filesystems are designed to work on high speed dedicated SANs, not a best-effort commodity ethernet. It sounds so simple, but what you are asking for is a very nontrivial thing.
Alternatively, see if your data sharing scenario can be NFS, SMB/CIFS, SimpleDB, or S3. These solutions all use higher layer protocols that are intended to share files without having a shared block device subsystem. Many times such a solution is actually more efficient.
In your case, you can still have a single MySql instance / fileserver that is accessed by multiple web front-ends. That fileserver could then store it's data on an EBS volume, allowing you to take nightly snapshot backups. If the instance running the fileserver is lost, you can detach the EBS volume and reattach it to a new fileserver instance and be back up and running in minutes.
"Is there anything like S3 as a filesystem?" - yes and no. Yes, there are 3rd party solutions like s3fs that work "ok", but under the hood they still have to make relatively expensive web service calls for each read / write. For a shared tools dir, works great. For the kind of clustered FS usage you see in the HPC world, not a chance. To do better, you'd need a new service that provides a binary connection-oriented protocol, like NFS. Offering such a multi-mounted filesystem with reasonable performance and behavior would be a GREAT feature add-on for EC2. I've long been an advocate for Amazon to build something like that.