NEW UPDATE:

Amazon has recently release a new storage option under EBS: IO2. This is a very high-performance, low latency SSD storage type that fully meets the most demanding requirements of a dataminer system.

Therefore, this would now be my recommendation for a high-performance enterprise cloud instance:

AWS Instance: m5.4xlarge with Enhanced Networking

› 100GB Dedicated OS C:/ drive on EBS Storage Volume: IO2 SSD Storage
› 300GB Dedicated Cassandra D:/ drive on EBS Storage Volume: IO2 SSD Storage
› 200GB Dedicated Elastic E:/ drive on EBS Storage Volume: IO2 SSD Storage
› 100GB Dedicated Swap F:/ drive on EBS Storage Volume: IO2 SSD Storage
› 100GB Dedicated Backup G:/ on EBS GP2 Storage*

*This is intended to be a place to store backups until they are moved to an S3 Bucket or other storage archive.