Amazon EBS Images

Amazon server instances can now be booted from EBS Snapshots as well as instance stores bundled onto S3.

This means changes in your server instance are persisted on an EBS volume so you don't lose them when the server shuts down. It should become the default way most people boot up their server images on Amazon EC2.

This takes Amazon much closer to the VMware approach of running virtual machines from Storage Area Networks. In addition to terminating an instance you can stop and start them which is like a pause. Also you can snapshot them just like on VMware.

Another benefit is the size of your root partition can be as large as 1 TB overcoming the old instance store limitation of 10GB.

ElastDream now fully supports booting amazon instances from EBS images. At the press of a button
    - Instances can be stopped and started.
    - Images can be created.
    - Instance attributes can be modified.
    - Additional block storage devices can be specified in the launch profile and automatically attached and mounted.
    - Snapshots can be taken of additional block storage devices.

It is interesting to see Amazon add more enterprise features to its cloud solution while VMware adds more cloud features to its strong Virtualization base vCloud. In the future both Amazon EC2 and vCloud will offer strong cloud solutions.

References:
Creating Consistent Snapshots of a Live Instance with XFS on a Boot-from-EBS AMI
Increasing Root Disk Size of an EBS Boot AMI on EC2
Resizing the Root Disk on a Running EBS Boot EC2 Instance
Amazon EC2 – Boot from EBS and AMI conversion