It wouldn't be much harder to run. You can start and stop the instance using the command line tools, so you could easily wrap the whole lot into a script which started the server and brought up the VPN link, then when youre finished take down the link then the server, all in once command.

The API-based management is what makes cloud providers really special.

Hopefully these scripts would eventually evolve into a client management panel, making this as easy to the general populace as Firesheep.

Amazon should bundle it together and offer it as a service.

Honestly, there are so many VPN providers that EC2 looks like overkill for this.

Care to list some decent ones? I'd be interested, but haven't looked for them much.

I have used www.tektonic.net since 2004 and have been pleased with their service.

That appears to be a VPS provider, not a VPN. And it costs more than 0.02$/hour on demand.

Sorry, misunderstood the question.

couldnt attackers then grab your EC2 dashboard cookie and possibly compromise your EC2 instance ?

I mean if you need to login there first via an unsecure session, its not really that much safer

The AWS console runs entirely over SSL, so it is secure. E.g. https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home

But the EC2 login should be via https, although I'm not 100% sure that is actually the case.

Your AWS dashboard would be compromised if you waited until you were on the open wireless network to run the EC2 instance, but attackers would not be able to compromise the EC2 instance. Once the instance has been created you can't change the Key Pair. You also can only download the private key associated with the Key Pair once, which is right when you create it. But of course, an attacker could stop or terminate your instance if he gained access to your AWS dashboard.

Not true: the dashboard runs entirely on SSL - which is still encrypted on an open wifi network. Compromising SSL isn't out of the question though, but highly unlikely.