Amazon brings greater flexibility to EC2

Amazon has added some enhancements to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that deliver greater flexibility for users, including the ability to change the configuration of an existing virtual machine.

The changes have been delivered as enhancements to the EC2 tab of Amazon's AWS Management Console, and were announced on the company's Web Services blog.

Possibly the most important new feature is the ability to change the instance type of a stopped EC2 virtual machine. This allows users to scale-up to a beefier specification with more memory, disk space or more processors if required, or downgrade as they see fit.

However, there are limitations to the changes users can make. It is not possible to simply switch an existing instance from a 32-bit to a 64-bit system, for example.

Users can also now control what happens when an instance using Amazon's EBS persistent storage shuts itself down, choosing whether it terminates or merely halts so that it can be restarted.

Other changes include the ability to modify the start-up parameters of an instance while it is stopped, while the Launch Instances Wizard now flags up pre-configured Amazon Machine Images that will not incur charges when operated within Amazon's Free Usage Tier, introduced last year.