CloudFormation, OpsWorks and Elastic Beanstalk

Now that AWS has announced OpsWorks and also has CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk there are questions on which application and infrastructure management tools is best for you.  Through in thinks like Chef and Puppet and things get really interesting. More can be found here:

https://aws.amazon.com/application-management/

AWS Environment Management Tool - ElasticWolf

Great tool to manage your AWS environment. 
https://github.com/vseryakov/ElasticWolf/downloads
Works with GovCloud as well.

AWS Cloud Formation error with private AMI

In working with Cloud Formation, I came across an issue that had an easy resolution that I thought would be more difficult given the error:

"CREATE_FAILED AccessDenied. User doesn't have permission to call ec2:RunInstances"

It turns out the error message is a bit deceiving as the problem was that the AMI attempting to be instantiated was private so no one but the owner could create the instance.  Just needed to make this a public AMI in order for the cloud formation template to work.