[mfringel]

This looks like a great way to get started with EC2, VPN or no. I've been thinking about it, but one thing still puzzles me. You choose an AMI, but does Amazon effectively create an EBS instance for you and populate it with a copy of the AMI?

I don't see any mention of an EBS instance being created, so I'm not quite sure how you can write to the filesystem at all. I'm sure I'm missing something here, but I'm not quite sure what. Thoughts?

[rmc]

You don't need an EBS to run an instance on EC2.

You can just run the instance as normal. It has a root filesystem, you can write to it etc. However if you stop the instance, then all your changes are lost. The EBS is only needed if you actually need disk space.

[arst]

Micros (which are what you get on the free tier) are only available as EBS-backed instances.

[deno]

It's worth noting that 20GB EBS space is provided with free tier. Though all default Ubuntu AMIs use 25GB EBS by default AFAIK.

[tpahax0r]

The AMI recommended in the post is pre-configured to use EBS. Makes things a lot easier that way!