Yeah. It's just a Xen VM. I do this every month or so. You just have to make sure that you have a kernel and modules you can boot the image with on your local Xen host. This is pretty easy, you can do it with whatever package manager your distro comes with, or if you created the image on a local Xen machine, you probably already have this. (yum install kernel-xen works on rhel)
It's true that you can't really do this with a live VM, since the AMI on EC2 will be whatever you had on the image before you last booted it. But you can do a ec2-bundle-vol on your live image to create a new AMI, then do your ec2-download-bundle on your new AMI.
You're really not as "locked in" to EC2 as some people think. You can easily pull your images off there, and then install Nimbus or OpenStack or something and run a local cloud. That's what we do at my job.
It's true that you can't really do this with a live VM, since the AMI on EC2 will be whatever you had on the image before you last booted it. But you can do a ec2-bundle-vol on your live image to create a new AMI, then do your ec2-download-bundle on your new AMI.
You're really not as "locked in" to EC2 as some people think. You can easily pull your images off there, and then install Nimbus or OpenStack or something and run a local cloud. That's what we do at my job.