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As the other comment said, no need for NGinx unless you're dealing with external assets you don't want to add to your project structure.

That said, I will say I run my Blog on Play 2.1 (RC2 IIRC) and 512MB means I have to set some tuneables to limit the max memory to 384MB. I haven't figured out how to get those to work with 'play dist' either, so I got it running by cloning the source and installing Play locally. Which isn't much fun.

I'm sure with a little more digging I could figure it out. That said, the default limit of 1.5GB is probably there for a reason. It seems well suited to EC2's m1.small instance (1.7GB).

Considering the in-memory caching, I'd just pony up the $44/month for such an instance for anything more than my personal blog.

Play runs on Netty. No nginx needed.

I have Play! running on my Raspberry Pi with a total of 232 MB RAM and it runs fine, although it's a bit slow. Play! itself uses about 55 MB, so it might get a bit tight if you plan to run some other software too.