Are you running 10,30 or 100 instances in your single EC2 Account? How do you identify each one?
There have been lot of questions on how to tag and manage a bunch of EC2 instances. To tell you I’ve been into your situation, after working with several EC2 clients. What a pain to keep track which instance is which.
Existing posts about How-are-admins-managing-their-ec2-ebss-and-snapshots and answers like Tagging-ec2-instances-using-security.
But in some cases, placing a set of instances into a set of groups, would possibly create or block access to the other instances using the same group when trying to change a security settings.
Matt Juszczak describe an example of this problem in his blog here.
Proposed Solution: Set a unique security group for an instance.
PROS:
1. It solves the tagging of each instance
2. Eliminates the possible problem describe above since the current instance is only affected when you try to change it’s security settings.
CONS:
1. Unfortunately, you have to define individual group for each of the instance and that is extra work.
2. Existing instances (especially production instances) cannot make use of this solution unless by launching the production image and remapping Elastic IP.