Amazon EC2 can now boot from Amazon EBS snapshots

Amazon EC2 has just announced the ability to boot instances directly from Amazon EBS snapshots, providing increased flexibility in how customers can manage their instances.

You can still save an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in an Amazon S3 bucket and boot it from the local instance store, but you can now also choose to save AMIs as Amazon EBS snapshots and boot directly from an Amazon EBS volume.