Even More EC2 Goodies in the AWS Management Console

We’ve added some new features to the EC2 tab of the AWS Management Console to make it even more powerful and even easier to use.

You can now change the instance type of a stopped, EBS-backed EC2 instance. This means that you can scale up or scale down as your needs change. The new instance type must be compatible with the AMI that you used to boot the instance, so you can’t change from 32 bit to 64 bit or vice versa.

The Launch Instances Wizard now flags AMIs that will not incur any additional charges when used with an EC2 instance running within the AWS free usage tier:

You can now control what happens when an EBS-backed instance shuts itself down. You can choose to stop the instance (so that it can be started again later) or to terminate the instance:

You can now modify the EC2 user data (a string passed to the instance on startup) while the instance is stopped:

We’ll continue to add features to the AWS Management Console to make it even more powerful and easier to use. Please feel free to leave us comments and suggestions.

— Jeff;