It’s now possible to change EC2 instance types

This is fantastic. The way it used to work, you’d create an EC2 slice that was a bundle of emulated hardware – dedicated RAM, processor, etc – and if you needed more, you had to physically move everything over to a new instance. Easy enough, and scriptable, but still kind of a pain, especially in high traffic scenario. It also created some confusion, in that scaling your system meant you could add new slices but not change the slices themselves.

Now, you can stop an instance, click a dropdown and choose a new instance type, allowing you to “scale” almost instantly.