I am playing around with Amazons EC2 new free tier plan and noticed the default ubuntu install comes with a user ubuntu that is preconfigured to work with your key you are provided from AWS. One thing I would like to do is add a new user and remove the default "ubuntu" user. From my experience with other VPS (VMWare and Rackspace cloud) you only have root on your fresh install (tho that is with Red Hat and not Ubuntu).
Should I have any problems removed the default ubuntu user?
Or should I just not touch the user "ubuntu" and create a new user for my to login and do my work.
Best Answer
Of course you can remove the ubuntu user, just make sure that the new user you created is able to sudo, etc..
All in all it doesn't really matter what your users are called. Services like cloudwatch also don't log into your instance to gain vitals. The instance is a virtual environment, what Amazon exposes is available to them from the host system.
Also, I don't see this user as a security hole -- by contrast, it was added to the Ubuntu AMIs because every other AMI allows you to login with root. That's more of a security issue. ;-)
Further more, the account is protected with a private key so I don't see an issue here unless your private key is compromised. In which case you should generate a new pair on the AWS console.
If you really want another login, you could try to rename it:
usermod -l NEWNAME ubuntu