How to boot an Amazon EC2 instance from an EBS volume
Suppose you want to start an Amazon EC2 virtual machine instance, but you want it to run from an EBS volume, so that the storage is persistent, and you don't need to worry about what happens if your instance terminates.
There are plenty of guides out there on how to convert an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) into a format that can be run from an EBS volume, instead of the volatile storage an instance usually runs from, but very few for how to get an instance to boot from an EBS. The reason for this is wonderfully simple, for a change.
We used the instances marked "EBS boot" from Alestic's site. Just start the instance. It'll know what to do, and it'll create its own EBS volume. That's it. No need to faff with console commands or complicated copying of files. If only all computer problems were this simple to fix.
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