A common question about moving applications to EC2 is what to do about sending email. Web applications occasionally send email, to their administrators (“Help! I’m running out of disk space!”) or to their users (“Here is your forgotten password”), and this needs to work when the application is hosted within EC2 also. Unfortunately, it is not simple to send email reliably from within the cloud. Here are some tips about sending reliable email from EC2 instances. ...
So you purchased an EC2 Reserved Instance and you’re looking to see the reduced hourly rate take effect immediately. Don’t. Unlike all the other resources in EC2, which you can use immediately, reserved instances are not actually available until the credit card charge for your account is processed. You’ll need to wait until the next billing period begins the charge clears your credit card before the reserved instance is actually available and the discounted hourly rate takes effect. Until your credit card charge goes through, your instances will continue to be billed at the regular hourly rates. ...
Update September 2010: AWS has added support for tagging instances, volumes, snapshots, and many other EC2 resource types via the API and the AWS Management Console. The techniques described here are no longer necessary. So you have a bunch of instances running in Amazon EC2 and you want to be able to tell them apart easily. The way to do this is to “tag” each instance with a descriptive tag, such as “database”, “web server”, “memcached”, etc. The easy, human-friendly way to tag your instances is to use ElasticFox, and the robust, programming-friendly way is to use Security Groups. ...
Here you will find practical tips for developers who are using cloud computing. This is me on the Amazon Web Services EC2 support forum, where I’m a frequent poster answering questions and sharing practical advice based on my experience. My nickname there used to be “shl0m0”; you might see that reference in older posts. My experience includes more than 15 years of software development and software architecture. I’ve been building cloud-computing-based applications for clients (including my own company MyDrifts, where I am CTO and co-founder) since 2007.