Take the tour ×  Are there any major security implications to
bundling a private AMI which contains the private
key/certificate & environment variables?  For resiliency I'm
creating an EC2 image which should be able to boot and configure
itself without any intervention. After boot it will attempt to:
• Attach & mount specific EBS volume(s)   • Associate a specific
Elastic IP   • Start issuing backups of the EBS volume(s) to S3
However, to do this it will need the private key/pem files and
will need certain environment variables to be available on
start-up. Since this is a private AMI I'm wondering if it will
be "safe" to store these variables/files directly in the image
so that I don't need to specify any user-data information and
can therefore start a new instance remotely (from my iPhone, if
needed) should the instance be terminated for any reason.
share|improve this question add comment  4 Answers  A private
AMI is safe, I wouldn't worry about anyone hacking your S3 data.
However, a running server is