Yes, I'm seriously overdue on a blog entry about current state-of-the-art for DBs at SmugMug. :( You can watch my keynote from the MySQL conference two years ago to see what we used to do, but things have progressed since then. http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2010/04/15/my-mysql-keynote-sli...
While the article doesn't answer this, it does explain how they manage to run a database on AWS without depending on EBS: their database isn't hosted by Amazon at all. "...the exact types of data that would have potentially been disabled by the EBS meltdown don’t actually live at AWS at all – it all still lives in our own datacenters, where we can provide predictable performance." So, while the actual solution they're using might be of interest, it wouldn't say much about how to host a database in AWS without relying on EBS.
It also doesn't explain how if they don't trust EBS they are going to replace their MySQL on dedicated servers. Sounds like they are considering the Cassandra route. Which gained a query language last week.
