Techniques are described for managing the execution of programs on multiple computing systems, such as on virtual machine nodes executing on the computing systems. A program execution service may in some situations provide the multiple computing systems and manage the program execution on behalf of multiple customers or other users, including to select appropriate computing systems to execute one or more instances of a program for a user, such as based in part on configuration information specified by the user. The described techniques may further include managing communications between multiple intercommunicating computing nodes in some situations.