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by euphemize 4559 days ago
A bit disappointed by this. As mentioned by ceejayoz, don't upload your .pem file anywhere!

AWS has tons of weird/interesting quirks - I thought this article was going to be about those.

Here's my 5 tips for AWS...

- SQS: encodes messages by default! plan accordingly if you are going to be sending large bodies (265K max).

- ELBs: they need time to warm up if you get a huge traffic spike. ELBs won't start scaling unless that traffic is sustained for a certain time (usually minutes).

- S3: watch out for "eventual consistency" if you're going to upload lots of files and try to access them right away - they might not be available immediately.

- Cloudwatch: set up alarms to make sure your billing never goes over threshold X in time Y. If someone compromised your account (because you uploaded your .pem file in cleartext to dropbox) and is mining bitcoins on your machines, you'll be notified.

- VPC: if you're going to build a services-oriented infrastructure, consider using a VPC! Unless you need to have all your services exposed to the public internet, it could save you a lot of time and security configuration trouble.

4 comments

On the last point, just use a VPC, period. I believe Amazon has now made this the default for new accounts, in fact. They come with no downsides and lots of benefits - being able to change security groups on the fly, elastic IPs that stay with the instance when stopped, etc.
True, all new AWS accounts create VPC based configs. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/defaul...
> - S3: watch out for "eventual consistency" if you're going to upload lots of files and try to access them right away - they might not be available immediately.

This is only true in the "US Standard" region. Other regions get read-after-write consistency (but not read-after-update, read-after-delete, etc). "US Standard" is the only bi-coastal S3 region, so I guess that consistency level would be too expensive, latency-wise.

I really apologize for wasting your time perhaps I will post these as a question next time. In any case I sincerely appreciate the feedback and your additional tips.
regarding ELBs, if you have a support contract with AWS you should be able to get them to "pre-warm" them if you are expecting a spike