Amazon Web Services have finally announced the availability of the ec2 micro instance running inside a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

This enables users to take advantage of the AWS free usage tier inside a VPC (you can run a micro instance 24/365 for your first year for free!).

The micro instance is a limited resources server (613mb memory and up to 2 EC2 cores) but it’s great for some non production servers, such as admin servers which don’t use too many resources.
It’s also suitable to use as development servers.

Remember that an ec2 instance type can be upgraded from micro to a more powerful instance type any time.

Personally I run my Puppet master and Approx package caching on micro ec2 instances.