Release: Amazon EC2 on 2010-09-19

Support for tags, filters, idempotent RunInstance calls, and ImportKeyPair.

Release Date: September 19, 2010
Latest Version: 2010-08-31
Created On: September 15, 2010
Last Updated: October 09, 2017

New Features

Feature Description
New API Version With this release, Amazon EC2 has a new API version (2010-08-31). The WSDL is at http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-08-31/AmazonEC2.wsdl.
Tags Amazon EC2 now supports tags, which are metadata you can optionally assign to instances, images, and other EC2 resources. There are also three new API actions for managing your EC2 tags: CreateTags, DescribeTags, and DeleteTags. The API tools have corresponding new commands: ec2-create-tags, ec2-describe-tags, and ec2-delete-tags. To get the latest version of the API tools, go to Amazon EC2 API Tools. The AWS Management Console now also supports tags, but only for resources you can manage on the Amazon EC2 tab of the console.

For more information, see Using Tags in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.
Filters Amazon EC2 now lets you use filters when you use many of the ec2-describe-* commands or Describe* API actions. For example, you could filter the results of a DescribeInstances call to include only instances in a particular Availability Zone with the status of stopped.

For more information, see Listing and Filtering Your Resources in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

Note: The Describe* actions for most of the Amazon VPC resources already had filtering enabled for them. With the 2010-08-31 release, we've added some new filters and slightly changed the names of some of the existing filters. We've also added filtering for ec2-describe-dhcp-options and DescribeDhcpOptions. For more information go to the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Command Line Reference or the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud API Reference.
Idempotentcy for RunInstances Amazon EC2 now lets you ensure the idempotency of your ec2-run-instances and RunInstances requests. When you launch an instance through the command line tools or API, you can optionally provide a client token. If timeouts or connection errors occur, you can repeat the request and be sure you haven't launched more instances than you intended.

For more information, go to How to Ensure Idempotency in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.
ImportKeyPair Amazon EC2 now lets you upload the public key from an RSA key pair that you create with a third-party tool. You can use the key pair in all Amazon EC2 Regions. You can import the key using either ec2-import-keypair or ImportKeyPair. The functionality is currently not available in the AWS Management Console.

For more information, go to:

Known Issues

Issue Description
Current Limitations for Tags and Filters You currently cannot tag the following resources:
  • Elastic IP addresses
  • Key pairs
  • Security groups
  • Placement groups

You can currently filter your resources in the AWS Management Console by tag, but not by the other filters that are available to use with Describe* actions through the command line tools or API.
Current Limitations for Micro Instances Following are current limitations of micro instances:
  • They are not available for use with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
  • They are not available for use with Amazon Elastic MapReduce
  • They are not available for use with Amazon DevPay
Current Limitations for Cluster Compute Instances Following are current limitations of cluster compute instances:
  • They support Linux/UNIX operating systems, but currently not Microsoft Windows Server
  • They are available only in the US-East (Northern Virginia) Region
  • Spot Instance requests for cluster compute instances are not supported
  • They are not available for use with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
  • They are not available for use with Amazon DevPay
Current Limitations for Cluster Placement Groups Following are current limitations of cluster placement groups:
  • You can't currently use Auto Scaling to launch cluster compute instances into a cluster placement group
  • Reserved Instances are not currently available within a cluster placement group
Setting the TCP_MAXSEG Socket Option The 2.6.18-164.15.1 kernel used in the CentOS 5.4 reference AMI (ami-7ea24a17) contains a known issue where setting the TCP_MAXSEG socket option on TCP sockets to certain values (known values include 1500) causes the kernel to generate TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) packets of invalid size that are then dropped by the NIC driver, resulting in very low network throughput. Don't set this socket option and let the kernel handle segmentation and Path Maximum Transmission Unit (PMTU) discovery using the default settings.
Query Version of ModifyInstanceAttribute The Query API ModifyInstanceAttribute request does not allow you to modify the block-device-mappings, and you can't modify the user-data attribute if it already contains data.
Paid AMIs Backed by Amazon EBS Amazon EBS-backed AMIs are not currently supported by Amazon DevPay.
Windows AMI launch times Windows AMIs take longer to launch than Linux/UNIX instances due to larger AMI sizes and multiple reboots.
Windows AMI sizes Installing software on Amazon S3-backed Windows AMIs can cause them to become large and easily reach the 10 GB limit. Before bundling, check the size of the C:\ volume.
Limitation on drive mapping There are limitations on devices available for storage attachment. For more information, go to How to Attach the Volume to an Instance in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.
Instance limit New users are limited to a maximum of 20 concurrent instances, but many of our customers use hundreds or thousands of instances. If you need a higher limit, go to http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/ec2-request.