> I've been using AWS since around 2007. Back then, EC2 storage was entirely ephemeral and stopping an instance meant losing all your data. The platform has come a long way since then.

Personally I miss ephemeral storage - having the knowledge that if you start the server from a known good state, going back to that state is just a reboot away. Way back when I was in college, a lot of out big-box servers worked like this.

You can replicate this on AWS with snapshots or formatting the EBS volume into 2 partitions and just clearing the ephemeral part on reboot, but I've found it surprisingly hard to get it working with OverlayFS