There are many ways to build AMIs, and this episode will show you how to use the same process Netflix uses by using Aminator. We will then take it one step further, and build AMIs using the Ansible Provisioner as well.

Every EC2 instance has access to meta-data, which can be used in combination with cloud-init to automation processes as an instance boots. CloudFormation parameters add extra flexibility to passing data to instances, and this episode will show you how to use them all.

By using reserved instances, you can save a substantial amount of money. This episode will show you how to determine the right type of reserved instance to buy.

By using Ansible in combination with AWS, you can achieve high levels of automation quickly and easily. This episode shows you how to install Ansible, configure the EC2 inventory plugin, perform ad-hoc tasks on instances, and how to write a few playbooks to automate processes.

Using lynx to browse the Hadoop web interfaces on an Elastic MapReduce cluster is cumbersome at best. These web interfaces were built for modern browsers, so this episode will teach you how to install and set up FoxyProxy to view EMR web interfaces directly in your web browser. You will also see this works with Ganglia, and with HBase.