I'm just getting up to speed on AWS and had a question about using an existing EBS volume as a boot device for an EC2 instance.
It looks like a lot of the instances create an EBS volume for their boot devices. In the situation where the EBS volume has been setup so that it is not deleted when the instance is terminated, is it possible to use that EBS volume as the boot/root device for a new instance?
For example say I have an instance using an EBS volume as the root device that is running on a hypervisor that crashes. Can I boot another instance using that EBS volume?
I can see that you could take a snapshot of the EBS volume and then create an AMI from that snapshot. So I guess that is one way to get it back, but I was curious if there was a more direct way?
I realize that ideally instances are throw away, but I'm just curious from a learning PoV.
Thanks, Joe