Now that Fedora 7 is out I figured it was time to update the EC2 instance howto. It is almost exactly the same as creating a FC6 instance so if you want to know the details you can reference that article.
Amazon just added NAT to their EC2 service. It also sounds like they will be turning the old direct addressing scheme off soon. This is probably a step towards assigning static IPs to your hosts in EC2. It may even allow you to have EC2 instances with no external IP address at all. It makes sense to not use an external IP when all you are doing is processing data from S3 and then sticking it back into S3. You can read more about the NAT change here.
There seems to be a lot of questions on how to set up dyndns with EC2. It is fairly easy to do but I haven't seen anyone put everything together to do it yet so I figured I would write a little example using ZoneEdit. I picked ZoneEdit because it lets you sign up and host 5 domains for free.
First you need to sign up for a free ZoneEdit account and add your domain. I'll assume you can do this. Don't forget to change your domain to point to the ZoneEdit DNS servers.
After working on my FC6 AMI I started thinking about how small of an AMI I could create. The goal would be to have a 10 meg or less image that is very specialized for doing something like serving images with lighttpd or apache. I started very very small but the lack of console access on EC2 makes it hard to debug errors so I moved on to try and find a reasonable sized distro that I was more sure would work. I managed to find a Debian image that is pretty small and decided to see if I could make it work for EC2.
I've been playing around with the EC2 service at Amazon and figured I would document a little about how you create your own FC6 AMI. The Amazon documentation goes over everything you need to know about creating your own FC4 AMI and if you don't want to roll your own you can use one of the public AMIs. Amazon just started letting people publish their own AMIs on their site so you should expect to see more as time goes by.