Micro instances have savage CPU throttling with a little bit of leeway. What this translates into is you'll compile something biggish (eg node.js), things will

Micro instances have savage CPU throttling with a little bit of leeway. What this translates into is you'll compile something biggish (eg node.js), things will seem fine for a few minutes, then the machine appears to freeze. * If you want to keep a machine around that you know doesn't do much, it's the cheapest option on AWS. But it's no fun if you're doing unplanned, interactive work. Even for the first use case, you want to fire up a bigger instance to do things like package installation, then restart as a micro once its configured. (* I experienced this a year ago. Others report similar things.)