Hi, today a really quick article about Amazon WebServices and the way it operates.
Quick summary
EC2 servers are Amazon’s equivalent of dedicated servers, while S3 are considered as buckets and are used to store files (it operates as a CDN). While on those instances, a MetaData server is available at that address:
http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/hostname
Accessing that address will give information about the hostname of the querying EC2 instance.
It is possible also, to recover information at latest/user-data, which includes start-up files. In this specific case, it could be possible to recover information such as startup username and passwords, private keys and so on.