September 29 2010, 9:23 PM
Amazon’s EC2 service now allows you to boot from persistent EBS volumes—a boon to those of us who like to run the occasional server-hour but don’t want to mess with bundling AMIs and other atrocities. The [AWS Management Console][1] automates most tasks, but you might find yourself quickly running into a two-part annoyance: (1) if you use public AMIs, the size of your EBS volume is chosen for you; and (2) EBS volumes are not resizable—at least, [not downwards][2]. Since Amazon charges you for allotted space on EBS volumes, this “annoyance” can literally cost you [tens of cents][3] per month!
Luckily, there is a workaround, and it has the side benefit of allowing you to boot one EBS volume on different instance types—that is, boot up your volume on an “m1.small” instance one day, a “c1.medium” the next, and so on. What follows assumes familiarity with Amazon Web Services and EC2, UNIX/Linux, the command-line, computers, typing, pants-wearing, etc.
Ok: Launch an EC2 instance fr