Yesterday Amazon announced some cool new feature on their EC2 platform: Boot your instance  from EBS (Amazon Block Store).

Your root partition of your image will be EBS, so this will give you the ability to:

• fine-grain control of software and data configuration
• increase the size of the local disk up to 1TB in size
• boot faster
• stop an instance and restart it at a later time with the disk configuration intact
• restart an instance and choose to use a different instance type (e.g., with more memory or CPU), a different operating system (e.g., with new security patches installed), or add new user data

read more @ source