Stopping and starting an instance erases the ephemeral disks, moves the instance to the new host equipment and issues new empty disks ... so the ephemeral disks will always be empty after stopping / starting. When an instance is stopped, it does not exist on any physical node — resources are freed.
So, the best approach if you are going to stop and start instances is not to add them to /etc/fstab but simply format them on first boot and mount them after that. One way to check for a file system is to use the file utility and grep its output. If grep does not find a match, it returns false.
The NVMe SSD in the i3 instance class is an example of instance storage capacity, also known as Ephemeral [Disk | Volume | Drive unit ]. They are physically located inside the instance and are very fast, but not redundant and not intended for persistent data ... hence, “ephemeral”. Persistent data must be on the Elastic Block Volume (EBS) or the Elastic File System (EFS) , both of which can withstand shutdown / start of an instance, hardware failures, and maintenance.
It's unclear why your instances are not loading, but nofail cannot do what you expect when volumes are present but do not have a file system. I got the impression that in the end it should work out.
But you may need apt-get install linux-aws when starting Ubuntu 16.04. Support for Ubuntu 14.04 NVMe is actually not stable and is not recommended .
Each of these three storage solutions has its advantages and disadvantages.
The instance store is local, so it's pretty fast ... but, it's ephemeral. It withstands hard and soft reloads, but does not stop / start cycles. If your instance is experiencing equipment malfunctions or plans to retire, as is the case with all equipment, you will have to stop and start the instance to transfer it to new equipment. Reserved and allocated instances do not alter the behavior of the ephemeral disk.
EBS is a permanent redundant storage that can be separated from one instance and moved to another (and this happens automatically through stop / start). EBS supports snapshots of a point in time, and they increase at the block level, so you do not pay for storing data that did not change in snapshots ... but through excellent witchcraft you also do not have to track “full” and “incremental” snapshots snapshots are only logical containers of pointers to backup data blocks, so they are, in fact, “full” snapshots, but only exposed as incremental ones. When you delete a snapshot, only blocks that are no longer needed to restore that snapshot and any other snapshot are deleted from the internal storage system (which, transparently for you, actually uses Amazon S3).
EBS volumes are available in both SSD and magnetic spinning disk volumes, again with trade-offs in cost, performance and related applications. See EBS Volume Types . EBS volumes mimic regular hard drives, except that their capacity can be manually increased on demand (but not reduced) and can be converted from one type of volume to another without shutting down the system. EBS performs all data migration on the fly with reduced performance, but no failures. This is a relatively recent innovation.
EFS uses NFS, so you can mount the EFS file system as many times as you want, even in availability zones within the same region. The size limit for any single file in EFS is 52 terabytes, and your instance will actually report 8 exabytes of free space. The actual free space for all practical purposes is unlimited, but EFS is also the most expensive - if you have 52 TiB files stored there for one month, this storage will cost more than $ 15,000. The most that I have ever stored was about 20 TiB for 2 weeks, it cost me about 5 thousand dollars, but if you need a place, the space is there. It is exposed hourly, so if you saved 52 TiB files in just a couple of hours and then deleted it, you would pay maybe 50 dollars. “Elasticity” in EFS refers to power and price. You have not provided a place in EFS. You use what you need and delete what you don’t have, and the billable amount is calculated hourly.
The discussion about storage would not be complete without S3. It is not a file system, it is a repository of objects. At approximately 1/10 the price of EFS, the S3 also has virtually infinite capacity and a maximum object size of 5 TB. Some applications are best developed using S3 objects instead of files.
S3 can also be easily used by systems outside of AWS, whether in your data center or in another cloud. Other storage technologies are intended for use inside EC2, although there is an undocumented workaround that allows EFS to be used externally or through regions with proxies and tunnels.