Yes, but as a lowly developer, I have no idea how to set read-ahead buffers or change io schedulers.

Plus, that's a year old, would love to see some updated advice. You'd think Amazon would write more guides like this.

Well, that's really just "-setra" and other file system mounting options, and mdadm (Linux software RAID) configuration options. Yes, there's a little bit of a learning curve and pain to get things set up, but it's not completely out of reach.

Despite being relatively old, I think the advice and approach still holds. Clearly, EBS hasn't improved since then and the need to do this kind of striping over EBS volumes hasn't been obviated yet.