The very name is kind of ridiculous, don’t you think? The word “ephemeral” means it can go away. It’s temporary. Fleeting, even. So why would I want to depend on storing something in a medium that can disappear without warning? And why am I forced to buy more of it when all I want is more CPUs or RAM?
Welcome to the paradox of ephemeral storage from cloud computing providers.
Ephemeral storage exists only because of how first-generation cloud providers chunk up servers. The business model is simple: they buy a physical server and try to sell as many virtual machines (VMs) as possible on top of that physical server. Since the VMs are trapped on physical machines in this approach, first-generation providers dictate cookie-cutter sizes that make that stacking game easier for themselves.