So, you've created a compute instance (ie, a virtual machine) on Amazon EC2. Next question: does the instance require access to and/or from the Internet?

Protip: just because you created the instance in the public cloud, i.e. the cloud that you get to over the Internet, it doesn't mean that your instances all need to sit on the Internet. They can have direct inbound and outbound Internet access, no Internet access, or something in between (which I'll explain).

The basic building block for networking on AWS is the VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). Within a VPC, you define your IP space, gateways, ACLs, DHCP options, and more. Gateways will be the focus of this article.

Continuing on with the theme of previous cheat sheet articles, this article will help decode the format for Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types.

Ok, you've just launched an Amazon EC2 instance (ie, a virtual machine) and you're ready to login and get to work. Just once teeeensy problem though... you have no idea how to actually connect to the instance!

This post will walk through how to log into brand new Linux/BSD and Windows instances (the steps are slightly different for different OS families).

I'd be lying if I said that since starting my new job at Amazon Web Services (AWS), I wasn't looking forward to writing about all the new things I was going to learn. Obviously there's the technology and services that make up the platform itself. But there's also the architectural best practices, the design patterns, and answers to questions like "how does moving to the cloud improve my performance/security/reliability?" Admittedly, I have a lot to learn.