I'm trying to figure out how to set up NoSQL databases in AWS, because I want to be able to persist data into an environment shared with dev team members on other sites. Problem is, I'm no Linux sys admin, so I'm missing that part of the story. And AWS is a mass of tools and weird configuration options about which I have not a single clue. The good news is that there are various pre-packaged options e.g. AWS Cloud Formation or other AMIs that you can deploy fairly easily to give you a starting point.
So why is it that when you deploy these things, they set themselves up with ephemeral storage by default?
I mean, if you're installing a database it's fair to assume that you want to store some data and to be able to come back at some later point and find it's still there. That's kind of implicit in the whole "persistence" thing, right? But if you shut down your little dev database on AWS overnight (so you don't have to sell a kidney to pay the Amazon charges), it loses all that pesky data because by default it set itself up with ephemeral storage. What part of "persistent" don't they understand?
I know you can configure your storage to be persistent, attach volumes to your servers etc, but I'd sort of hoped the pre-packaged options might spare me all the hassle initially so I could just get on with using the database and learn that stuff later. Instead I now have another freakin' learning opportunity to work through before I can learn the stuff I really want to do. That really grinds my gears!
