My problem

I am working as a consultant for various companies. Each company provides me with a laptop with their software on and I also have my own, where I have my development environment. I tend to buy a new laptop every second year and find myself spending lots of time configuring and installing software. I also spend a lot of time waiting for my laptop to process things.

To solve all these issues, I am now considering using EC2 (running windows instances) as my main development platform and just access this from any PC I happen to be at. I calculated that running the Large instance (cheapest 64-bit) for 8 hours a day for a year costs me 960$ per year, which is acceptable.

I imagine that when I approach the workplace each day, I will make a single tap on my phone to fire up the instance, so it is ready when I get to work. I should have different icons on my phone to fire up the various instance types. The same software should of course automatically be loaded on the various hardware (sometimes I would even need their instance with 68.4 GB of memory).

Another advantage is that if I am having a specific problem with my instance, I could fire up another instance and have someone look into the problem and update the image.

My question:

Does anyone have experience with such a setup on EC2? What kind of problems do you foresee?