Amazon EC2 Introduces Tagging, Filtering, Import Key Pair, and Idempotency

Posted on: Sep 20, 2010

We are excited to let you know about four separate features that will make EC2 easier to use for customers with large deployments. First, we’ve added the ability to tag EC2 resources to simplify the administration of your cloud infrastructure. A form of metadata, tags can be used to create user-friendly names, enhance searchability, and improve coordination between multiple users. The AWS Management Console has also been updated to support tagging.

We’re also announcing the ability to filter among your EC2 resources to find ones that match specified criteria. For example, you can use filtering to quickly determine which instances are running in a particular Availability Zone or which snapshots are associated with a particular EBS volume. Filtering will make it easier to manage resources within your deployment.

Starting today, you can also use your own RSA keys to access your EC2 instances instead of relying on AWS generated keys. This feature gives you complete control over your private keys and will also allow you to use the same RSA key across different regions, simplifying resource management.

Last but not the least, you will also be able to idempotently launch instances so that timeouts or connection errors do not result in the launch of more instances than you originally intended, saving you time and money.