1. Never ever share your access key and code with others.
2. Never ever use your personal credentials on EC2, create another IAM user instead.

# Configure AWS
# This would create ~/.ssh with details
$ aws configure

# Configure AWS for a profile
$ aws configure --profile devdude

# S3 commands
$ aws s3 ls
$ aws s3 ls s3://mybucket
$ aws s3 mb s3://mynewbucket
$ aws s3 ls --profile devdude # using a profile

3. You can fetch metadata about an EC2 from http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data

4. If you don't specify a region, the SDKs would default to us-east-1.

5. It's recommended to use default credential provider chain.

6. Any API that fails because of too many calls need to be retried with Exponential Backoff.

7. These apply to rate-limited API and the retry mechanism is included in SDK API calls.