So as Jeff Barr recently pointed out over on the Amazon Web Services blog,

Amazon Web Services Blog: Redundant Disk Storage Across Multiple EC2

M_david_preparing_for_ec2_persisten
XML Hacker M. David Peterson has put together a really interesting article.

As part of his work at 3rd and Urban, he has implemented redundant, fault-tolerant, read-write disk storage on Amazon EC2 using a number of open source tools and applications including LVM, DRBD, NFS, Heartbeat, and VTUN.

Mark notes that "the primary focus of this paper is to present both a detailed overview
as well as a working code base that will enable you to begin designing,
building, testing, and deploying your EC2-based applications using a
generalized persistent storage foundation, doing so today in both lieu
of and in preparation for release of Amazon Web Services offering in
this same space."

The article provides complete implementation details and links to source code for the scripts that Mark developed.

You can read the article, and you can also follow progress via the discussion group.

– Jeff;

Firstly, and most importantly, as pointed out in the first portion of this article,

Firstly, a HUGE thank you to Jeff Barr, lead Technical Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, for taking the time to read, edit, and provide feedback that has helped round out this paper in the proper areas. Thanks, Jeff!

Secondly, all of what follows is only possible due to the hard work and dedication of the core developers, maintainers, and contributors to the LVM, DRBD, NFS, Heartbeat, and VTun projects. To each of these aforementioned folks, thanks!

In addition to Jeff Barr, special thanks to a bunch of really talented folks@AWS including Martin Buhr, Rudy Valdez, Kathrin Jackson, Roland, Andries, MattG, Andrew, Atle (Beyond “@AWS”, I wish I knew their last names!) and a whole list of internal AWS folks who have contributed in one form or another to the development of this whitepaper.

Lastly, a special thanks to AWS community members Mitch Garnett, Thorsten von Eicken, scientastic, Edward Goldberg, Dan Kearns, Allen, and D. Kavanagh for helping to work through a lot of the initial ideas that went into the creation of this paper.

Thanks, everyone!

With the disclaimer this paper should be viewed as beta quality firmly in place, if gaining the benefits of data persistence, redundancy, and fault-tolerance, with read/write access to this data over multiple EC2 nodes *today* interests you, then no doubt you know what to do from here.

Enjoy!