As noted above, virtual compute service 230 may offer various compute instances to clients 210. A virtual compute instance may, for example, comprise one or more servers with a specified computational capacity (which may be specified by indicating the type and number of CPUs, the main memory size, and so on) and a specified software stack (e.g., a particular version of an operating system, which may in turn run on top of a hypervisor). A number of different types of computing devices may be used singly or in combination to implement the compute instances of virtual compute service 230 in different embodiments, including special purpose computer servers, storage devices, network devices and the like. In some embodiments instance clients 210 or other any other user may be configured (and/or authorized) to direct network traffic to a compute instance. In various embodiments, compute instances may attach or map to one or more data volumes provided by a block-based storage service (not illustrated) in order to obtain persistent block-based storage for performing various operations.