>> I guess it hadn't really registered that it's possible to make an 
>> instance immediately start doing work as soon as it boots up.
> 
> Yes. It's not hard to make a rc.local that runs something.

...unless you run a Windows instance. ;-)

>> Interestingly, the documentation for DevPay seems to indicate that I 
>> could (for example) create an instance, install POV-Ray, and charge 
>> people money to run this instance, and thereby earn money. I bet it 
>> wouldn't actually work though.
> 
> I am not sure what "work" means here. It apparently has some troubles, 
> but not that much. I was thinking of making one to run my distributed 
> job computing software (aka OddJob), but I couldn't figure out all the 
> places where my S3 password was stored and such, so I didn't keep 
> chasing it.

I'm thinking more about the following:

1. No sane person is going to pay money to run POV-Ray on Amazon when 
they could just run it locally on their own PC for free.

2. I have a vague recollection that attempting to do this contravines 
the POV-Ray license.

3. If you *were* going to pay money for a POV-Ray rendering engine, you 
wouldn't want to log in, start up a VM, copy all your files onto the 
server, configure all of POV-Ray's options, set it running, and check it 
three times a day to make sure it hasn't finished. (You'll still be 
charged if you don't shut it down as soon as the render is done.)

What you'd *actually* want is a button in POV-Ray that says "submit to 
server" and it grabs all the files, INI files, etc., zips them into a 
big bundle, uploads it, adds it to the server render queue, and emails 
you the result when it's finished or something.

As far as I can tell, it's not possible to do this. Or at least, it's 
not possible to use DevPay to do this. You'd have to have an instance 
running constantly, and you'd have to pay for it whether there's work to 
do or not.

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