AFAIK if you only want a box to act as a dev environment, that would not be much work beyond ec2:run-instance? Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?
Yeah, but even for fairly technical people, there's a lot more of a learning curve there than there needs to be (starting up an instance is easy, getting all the security stuff set up is more of a pain). Having something which is easier to manage without all the complexity of AWS seems reasonable.
standard installations (set yourself up with the tools you want running on the machine), keeping track of and managing the security parts (security keys/access credentials), mapping to any static IP or domain name you may want to use for ease of access, and other niceties could make the process smoother if you were purely focused on the developer workflow
also when you're testing things out on the machine you have to know how to change security settings for opening ports and providing access externally. These aren't too complicated to do, but just generally having simple tools/UI for making this simpler could be useful. for example, if you're a flask dev you may want to just run a site "locally" and make a few setting changes before being able to access your site. i've helped friends with how to do that before
AFAIK if you only want a box to act as a dev environment, that would not be much work beyond ec2:run-instance? Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?