AWS EC2 EBS are exceedingly fault tolerant virtual disks. Straight from Amazon's docs...
Amazon EBS volumes are designed to be highly available and reliable. At no additional charge to you, Amazon EBS volume data is replicated across multiple servers in an Availability Zone to prevent the loss of data from the failure of any single component. For more details, see the Amazon EC2 and EBS Service Level Agreement.
The durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot. As an example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS Snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives.
With Blumetech Managed Services for AWS, we take snaphots of our client's EBS volumes as often as hourly. With all these snapshots the likelihood of a volume failure is extremely rare.
However in the words of Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, "Everything fails all the time". EBS volumes no matter how reliable will eventually have failures.
To better respond and be alerted to these failures, we are happy to announce that we will be monitoring all of our client's EBS volumes for any impaired or warning status. We scan for status changes by default every 5 minutes. If an impaired EBS volumes is detected, an e-mail is sent to the client.
This additional service is immediately available to all of Blumetech's Managed Services customers. There is no additional charge for the additional monitoring. Enjoy!