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.
This is working right now, though it’s just the base system. Next is using the EC2 metadata to configure the instance, e.g. set ssh keys. And then using cloud services for things like logging.
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.