Amazon does not return recently created spot instance requests

This sucks: When you create a spot instance request, you get a request id. However, when you query AWS for that id, sometimes it does not exist.
We have to add a pause before we start querying Amazon for spot instance status.
I think the same applies to regular instance requests - instance ids cannot be used right away e.g. for tagging. Instead, you have to wait for some undefined period of time. In case of regular instances, you can at least monitor the instance status - with spot requests, you can't do anything.