And so EC2 repents for another one of their design mistakes... finally fixing the problem that storage isn't persistent. Maybe we can look forward to EC2 one day becoming a standard Virtual Private Server environment!
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974089" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974089</a> has a direct link to the news at <a href="http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/new-amazon-ec2-feature-boot-from-elastic-block-store.html" rel="nofollow">http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/new-amazon-ec2-feature-bo...</a> .
People have been doing this using the Linux kernel's root pivot functionality. While it might be a bit more copious as you've got to launch the instance, wait for it to come up, then attach the EBS, it's not that much more complicated.