Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the point of ec2 style clouds was to create an ami with everything configured just how you need it ahead of time, and boo

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the point of ec2 style clouds was to create an ami with everything configured just how you need it ahead of time, and boot lots of small machines off that. The data should be fed from s3 or from rds or from an ec2 instance with a database which stores it's data on an ebs. The main idea is that it's an easy platform to scale horizontally from. It never really struck me as intended to be a service which you run something like wordpress from... What this guy probably wanted was something like rackspace and linode offer, which is a vm with a persistant disk, more in line with vmware on the desktop or esx, or xen, than amazons offering.