title: How to increase ulimit on Amazon EC2 instance?
body: <p>After SSH'ing into an EC2 instance running the Amazon Linux AMI, I tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ulimit -n 20000
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>...and got the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>-bash: ulimit: open files: cannot modify limit: Operation not permitted
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, the shell allows me to <strong>decrease</strong> this number, for the current session only.</p>
  
  <p>Is there anyway to <strong>increase</strong> the ulimit on an EC2 instance <strong>(permanently)</strong>?</p>