[doanerock]

When there is a hardware failure, do you have to rebuild or does the original vm come back in minutes/hours/days?

[bdcravens]

I believe the instance goes away. If you've persisted data to EBS, you can attach the volume to a different instance. Anything outside of EBS is lost. However, if you created an AMI (AWS Machine Image), you can launch a new instance from that. (but it's a snapshot, not a live image, so it'll be only as up to date as it was when saved)

[ncsurfus]

The instance isn’t terminated (gone). It’s either shutdown or rebooted depending on the type of hardware failure.