I have been building a bunch of Windows AMIs for EC2 recently. If the instance fails to build it can be a real bear to diagnose issues. You don't have access to the console to watch what's happening. It would be great if I could log to the EC2 Console (also called the System Log on the web site) so I knew what was happening. So I hacked the EC2Config Service to see how it was writing to the console.

When you create an Windows AMI (Amazon Machine Image) it is configured to generate a random server name. Often this name does not meet your needs. Maybe your company has a specific naming convention (e.g US-NYC-1234) or you just want to use a descriptive name (e.g. WEB01). Whatever the reason, let's look at how to set the name when you launch the machine. In this post we will use PowerShell to read the name from a Tag on the instance.