Here are 5 best practices you should consider to help make your Labor Day Weekend 'Cloud-Care-Free".

If you're expecting an increase in demand over the weekend here is a checklist to mark off before you head out on holiday:

* Check for unhealthy load balanced EC2 instances. Unhealthy load balancing with instances are a prime point of failure over AWS. It's not enough to have an instance behind Elastic Load Balancers (ELB); instances need to be configured with a health check to ensure that the instance is working correctly. When instances fail the health check, they are automatically moved from the ELB itself. The risk here is that you could be saving data, running , or relying on other loads to execute, but won't necessarily know that there is a problem with data stores until it's too late. Combined with poor backup practices and limited resources over the holiday, you could potentially struggle with long delays redeploying your data, applications or other cloud environments. If in doubt, take a snapshot before the weekend, shut the idle instances down, and reload the snapshot when you return next week.

* Check for over utilization. Over utilization can be an embarrassing, and generally single point of failure over the weekend. In some cases we've seen instances become over utilized because they weren't ready to handle unexpected demand over Memorial Day, resulting in data loss and other problems. Make sure you have or consider an auto-scaling solution to overcome utilization shortcomings.