There are a number of artifacts you have to keep track of when using Amazon Web Services. Here is a quick rundown of them, and what the consequences are if you lose them.

1. Amazon user name and password - not a big deal if you lose this; as long as you have access to the email account associated with your account, you can reset your account and get access again.
2. Amazon key and secret - as long as you can get into your account, you can see your key and secret. If you ever suspect that your account has been compromised, you can reset your secret. Doing this means any application that is using your secret will need to be updated.
3. X.509 Certificate associated with your account - you can always download your public certificate, but you only get one chance to get your private key. When you first create your certificate, you will be prompted to save your private key. If you don’t save the key then, or you lose the key, that’s it, you need to create a new public key and you’ll get a new secret. These certificates can be used to authenticate to AWS in an application you build, but I haven’t seen many people do that. The only real issue I’ve seen is that the EC2 command line tools use these certificates. So if you lose the private key, you’ll need to get a new private key and update your EC2 command line tool installation.
4. keypair used to launch your instance - if you’re using Linux or Solaris EC2 images, you can’t lose this. If you do, you won’t be able to get access to your instance because you don’t know the root password. Amazon support may be able to help you, but that’s about it. If you are using Windows, then there is a chance you have the administrator password written down, or maybe you changed it to something you know. Otherwise, you’re stuck, you won’t be able to get access. Your only choice will be to terminate the instance and restart it. Of course, that means you will lose your instance data.

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