For anyone interested in this thread/topic there was some discussion in the Elixir Slack nerves channel about a project to get this exact idea working with EC2 (by @jakemorrison):

https://github.com/cogini/nerves_system_ec2
https://github.com/cogini/hello_nerves_ec2

I’ll definitely be following these projects intently.

I did some more work on this and documented it here Running Nerves on Amazon EC2
It is now getting ssh keys for the console from the instance.

I played around with deploying Nerves “firmware” to the cloud a while back. My notes are here: GitHub - fhunleth/vultr_example: Experiment in using Nerves to deploy to the clouds · GitHub. I originally looked at deploying to AWS, and it seemed feasible but I got a little lost in Amazon terminology. Getting something to work on Vultr was easy so I went there instead.

Some takeaways from doing this were:

1. It’s definitely possible.
2. Server hardware and networking are simpler than what we have to deal with in the embedded use cases, so there are opportunities to streamline the tooling and base libraries for ease-of-use.
3. Bootstrapping servers to work with Nerves needs work. For Vultr, I have an iPXE script to load the first image, but it’s really tedious to use. From there on, you can update it via nerves_firmware_ssh which is easier.
4. I don’t know enough about server deployment and operations to know what should be in the base Nerves image and what all is expected in the tooling. For example, it’s possible to put Postgres in the base image (per the reddit post), but I’m not sure that’s desirable. It seems easier (to me) to have a dedicated server for the database rather than combining it.

Anyway, Nerves in the cloud hasn’t been a focus for me, but if others want to pursue it, I certainly would help on low level details.

Frank