

Even More EC2 Goodies in the AWS Management Console - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/03/even-more-ec2-goodies-in-the-aws-management-console.html

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timrobinson
I'm glad they added the ability to change the instance type. Previously you
could stop the instance from the management console, and start it up again
afterwards, but you'd have to run `ec2-modify-instance-attribute` in between.

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jeffbarr
Happy to help. I should have said more about the idea of upshifting onto more
powerful hardware but that slipped my mind.

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lurker19
Does stopping then resizing then starting an instance preserve local non-EBS
data?

Is it like a "portable hibernate image" of the system?

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timrobinson
Stop = power off, so no, only EBS data is kept. When you start the instance
again, the OS boots from scratch.

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lurker19
Ah. A hibernate-to-EBS feature would be nice, so that an idle EC2 instance
could be concerted from $/day to $/month when idle, for use cases (like mine)
where I have installed a bunch of scripts and data on a single host that I
would like to scale up to one big machine for burst jobs, hibernate over the
weekend or when I am not running jobs, but otherwise be available for
interactive access for script editing.

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Vitaly
When will they allow to change security groups for a running instance? duh!?

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bmelton
I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but has anybody done anything with
the VMWare imports?

Specifically, I'm curious how you have a virtual image that isn't ephemeral,
or, put differently, how you specify what goes onto EBS and what doesn't.

It's kind of hard to keep up with everything Amazon has going on right now --
I was investigating the prospect of whether or not to implement something like
CloudKick to manage scaling, and lo and behold, Amazon offers AutoScaling. I
remembered having seen the announcement, but with everything they're doing,
even though it's a high signal to noise ratio, there's so much signal it's
hard to keep sorted.

