I am trying to create a server structure for my EC2 account. The design I have chosen consists of 2 instances running in different availability zones, elastic load balancer, an auto-scaling group with cloudwatch monitoring configured and a security group defining rules for access to the instances. This setup is to support an online web application written in PHP. I am trying to decide what is a better policy: Store MySQL DB on a separate Instance Store MySQL DB on an attached EBS volume (from what i know auto-scaling will not replicate the attached EBS volume but will generate new instances from a chosen AMI - is this view correct?) Regards the AMI I plan to use a basic Amazon linux 64 bit AMI, and install bastille (maybe OSSEC) but I am looking to also use an encrypted file system. Are there any issues using an encrypted file system and communication between the DB and webapp i neeed to be aware of? Are there any comms issues using the encrypted filesystem on the instance housing the webapp I was going to launch a second instance or attach a second volume in the second availability zone to act as a standby for the database - I'm just looking for some suggestions about how to get the two DB's to talk - will this be a big task Regards updates for security is it best to create a recent snapshot and just relaunch and allow Amazon to install updates on launch or is the yum update mechanism a suitable alternative - is it better practice to relaunch instead of updates being installed which force a restart. I plan to create two AMI snapshots one for the app server and one for the DB each with the same security measures in place - is this a reasonable - I just figure it is a better policy than having additional applications that are unnecessary included in a AMI that I intend on using. My plan for backup is to create periodic snapshots of the webapp and DB instances (if I use an additional EBS volume instead of separate instances my understanding is that the EBS volume will persist in S3 storage in the event of an unexpected termination and I can create snapshots of the volume backup purposes). Thanks in advance for suggestions and advice. I am new to EC2 and I may have described unnecessary overkill but I want to try implement what can be considered a best practice solution so all advice is appreciated.