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.