AWS Administration – The Definitive Guide

Recommendations and best practices

Here are a few key takeaways from this chapter:

• First and foremost, create and use separate IAM users for working with EC2. DO NOT USE your standard root account credentials!
• Use IAM roles if you need to delegate access to your EC2 account to other people for some temporary period of time. Do not share your user passwords and keys with anyone.
• Use a standard and frequently deployed set of AMIs as they are tried and tested by AWS thoroughly.
• Make sure that you understand the difference between instance store-backed and EBS-backed AMIs. Use the instance store with caution and remember that you are responsible for your data, so take adequate backups of it.
• Don't create too many firewall rules on a single security group. ...