Here's What You Need to Know About Amazon EC2

Availability Zones are Randomized Between Accounts

I had someone from Amazon tell me this, so I assume this to be true. In order to prevent people from gaming the system availability and over allocating instances in a singe az, zones ids are randomized across customers. So for any two accounts us-east-1a != us-east-1a. Amazon promises availability zones to be separate for your account, it makes no promises about keeping these consistent across accounts. If you’re using multiple accounts, don’t assume you can choose the same availability zone.

No Instance is Single Tenant

We all want to game they system, and I’ve heard rummors that XL instance, and 4XL instances are single tenant, one VM per hardware instance. I’ve come to believe that no EC2 instances are single tenant, even the cluster compute instances. Its a fair bet that systems can easily be purchases with 96GB+ of memory, so AWS has likely been using configurations like this for the past 2+ years. Its always possible to have a noisy neighbor, don’t assume you can buy your way out.

Micro Instances Aren’t Good for Production Use

If you do anything at any kind of scale, don’t use micro instances. They have variable performance, and you shouldn’t rely on them for anything.

EBS Should only be Allocated 1TB at a Time

This is one area where it seems you can game the system. Many people have reported that by using 1TB volumes you get better performance. The conventional wisdom is that you are allocating a drive, or at least most of one. So, don’t skimp; over allocate if you need EBS.