You might want to investigate how to to set up an EBS backed persistent root filesystem on AWS as well as how to do S3 snapshot backups. EC2 instances fail. EBS volumes fail. You need to be ready for that regardless of the revision control choices you make.
Also, SVN stores a local copy of the codebase as well. If you're working off trunk and the SVN server detonates, all you lose is the history and any branches you didn't have checked out.
You can just train the "new tech tolerant ones" in git-svn and don't worry as well.
Edit: We also have a script that takes a daily snapshot of all our EBSes, but we haven't tried to recover them (mostly due to lack of time to experiment).
It seems like this is the main reason why you switched from SVN to Git -- hype.
Now remote git repositories (akin to svn repos) do not have a good locking large binary file solution. But other than large binaries, git is very nice in comparison (You could do hg or bzr if you prefer and gain the same, although their git/svn bridges are not known to me).
That refers to exchanging clarity or simplicity for performance. If a technique is fundamentally superior then it's just the way you should do things, and few things in tech are as unilaterally superior as git over svn.
At least in the Ruby world, if you are on SVN, say goodbye to any competent devs. We can't work under those conditions.
The equivalent in svn would make me groan, for complexity and for the performance.
Also, the same rules apply when 'cave-hiding'. You should still be committing early and often, but in gitland, 'committing' really means syncing up with an authoritative repo. You can 'cave-hide' in svn by just not committing anything and keeping your changes in your local working copy.
When you are pushing your changes back to trunk, how safe is that process?
In a normal SVN workflow, when you're ready to commit your changes to the central repository to which a team member has also committed changes, you'll end up running 'svn up' followed by 'svn commit.' If you have substantial code changes and you screw up the merge during 'svn up,' there's little record of your pre-update code. In the case that you accidentally select the trunk version of a changed file for the merge, your own recent code may be overwritten.
With Git/Hg/etc, you are constantly committing your changes to the VCS. And you commit before you merge your working copy with any changes pulled from the "central" repository. If you screw up the merge, the DVCS has a record of your local work-in-progress code changes.
You could argue with SVN that any sufficiently large feature transaction should be done in a branch. Then the merge back to trunk will be safe with the branch's commit history. Pragmatically speaking, however, many people - especially small teams - end up doing all of their SVN-based development simply using 'svn up' and 'svn commit.' I know I have.
The safety that comes with a detailed commit history, especially for day-to-day file merges, is one big advantage of DCVSs.
The founders originally wanted to upgrade from CVS to SVN. I pointed-out that not only would they have transactional commits in Git, but that they could recover from anyone's copy of the repository, since everyone has a local clone. That, plus the first check-in (which ran blazingly fast) ended the argument.
