Experiences and tips for programming with and for Amazon's cloud servers/apps/tools?

Question

We're looking into developing a product that would use Amazon's cloud tools (EC2, SQS, etc), and I'm curious what tips/gotchas/pointers people that have used these technologies have.

One tip/whatever per post, please.

Answer 1

The Elasticfox plug-in for Mozilla makes doing a lot of the EC2 stuff easier. It can be found at: Elasticfox Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2. This page has links specifically to download the Elasticfox plug-in and also the associated Sourceforge project. Well worth using...

Answer 2

Get a developer account at Right Scale. It's free and a god-send for a guy who hates remembering those dumb commands and arguments. If you only resort to Amazon-supplied tools, you're throwing away your human rights.

Answer 3

We're interested in EC2 where i work. We don't care about web-serving or enterprisey stuff, just massive number crunching for physics, using python. This EC2 stuff had me befuddled, with most documentation oriented toward businessy applications and using C# or Java, but this slide show clarified much for me, especially for using python: http://www.datawrangling.com/pycon-2008-elasticwulf-slides

Answer 4

As for SimpleDB, it has a very limited query language and it is very restrictive. If you planning on having lot of complex queries, you must first sit down and think how to organize your data to make those queries possible. One thing missing, but that will probably will be added, is the ability to count the results of a given query, much like SQL's COUNT.

Performance is ok, but I consider the latency maybe a little high.