Hi,

Reading Chris' report, I was inspired to try the same thing on EC2.  I
don't know much about Linode or Rackspace, but I do know EC2.  I'm happy
to report that I was successfully in creating a GuixSD EC2 instance.

Here's what I did.  Essentially, all I wanted to do was run "guix system
init" on the root device of an EC2 instance.  I accomplished that by
running "guix system init" on a loopback device (on my laptop), copying
the file which backed the loopback device onto an EC2 instance, writing
the file to an EBS volume attached to the instance, and then replacing
the EC2 instance's root EBS volume with the newly written EBS volume.

Here are the steps I took, in detail.  Hopefully it's clear enough for
someone else to try it out if they want to.

(From the AWS Management Console)

* Launch an instance.  I used an EBS-backed Ubuntu AMI using HVM
  virtualization in the us-west-2 region.  This one: ami-cbd276ab.  It
  needs to be EBS-backed because I want to be able to detach and attach
  the volumes easily; it needs to be HVM virtualization because that way
  it will boot using the GRUB I will install in the GuixSD system's root
  device (paravirtualized EC2 instances follow a different boot
  process).  In the web UI, before launching the instance, I removed the
  ephemeral storage from it (since I didn't need it), and I added an
  extra 30 GiB EBS volume (this will become the GuixSD system's root
  device).  I also gave the instance a name tag to keep track of it in
  the AWS Management Console.  I used an m3.medium type instance, since
  that is the smallest type which would give me consistent performance.
  Here's a quick link to launch the AMI I used:
  https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home?region=us-west-2#launchAmi=ami-cbd276ab

(On my local computer)

* Generate a hashed password for use in the operating system config (see
  "(guile) Encryption" for details).  Here, the password is
  57HdiXRftjV55zpXh5k3 (don't worry, I've changed it :-)):

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
scheme@(guile-user)> (crypt "57HdiXRftjV55zpXh5k3" "$1$JoT5zkpN")
$2 = "$1$JoT5zkpN$1CEM/T/UZ5a4nP1Kh8QoZ/"
scheme@(guile-user)> 
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

* Make the following changes to the "bare-bones" operating system
  configuration file that comes with Guix
  (gnu/system/examples/bare-bones.tmpl), in order to enable remote login
  using that password: