[vacri]

> you can instead push your artifacts to an s3 target

This is our tactic. I tried to do baked AMIs at one point, but the 10-15 minute turnaround in registering them meant that we couldn't use them for staging or testing (too long to iterate changes).

Previously we were capistrano-deploying with git from bitbucket - every server had to individually git pull from servers on the other side of the continent, over the public internet. Susceptible to all sorts of problems.

[jonaf]

You can speed up AMI baking by using chroot + a mounted EBS volume on a running instance. It should drastically reduce the time it takes to produce a new image. Also be sure that you're building EBS-backed AMI's, as S3-backed AMI's will require a lot of time for copy.