In case you haven’t heard, AWS released t2.micro instances that are cheaper and more awesome than the existing t1.micro instances.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/low-cost-burstable-ec2-instances/
But I had some trouble initially moving to these new instances types. Amazon’s error messages are not always helpful. Even though they’re supposed to support changing instance types from t1.micro to t2.micro. I got the following error message:
The requested configuration is currently not supported. Please check the documentation for supported configurations.
That’s because there’s two important restrictions to t2.micro instances:
- Visualization must be hvm
- Windows VMs are always hvm
- t2.micro instances can only be launched in Amazon VPC
Luckly, Amazon VPC is no extra charge. However, if an instance is deployed to Amazon classic, then to move it to Amazon VPC you’re going to have to create an AMI of your machine and then launch that image into Amazon VPC. Be careful though, because Amazon elastic IP addresses used in Amazon classic cannot be used in Amazon VPC. So be aware that you will have to request a new IP and update your DNS accordingly.