[scrollaway]

Rebuilding AMIs is not a thing you should be doing every deployment. Sounds like you are on AWS so use proper containers on ECS or EBS. Docker itself caches pretty aggressively. Decompose your projects as well so that the independent parts build and deploy without rebuilding everything else in the project that hasn't changed.

At the end of the day, if you're on continuous deployment, a commit should be rebuilding only what it touches. We have 4 min long deployments + 1.5 min tests and I definitely don't think we're optimizing aggressively.

[devonkim]

Things get awkward when versioning standards require all application components to have the same version because several version numbers running around is cognitive overhead that engineers can’t afford in many situations. With more than about 10 components I’ve usually seen it turn into “deploy 10 services that have 10 changes, 9 of which have one commit that bump a version number up.”

Many places still keep producing very stateful software (sometimes even very much by choice) that is better off managed through Puppet / Chef rather than an immutable containerized approach. If your software needs to take an hour and a half to shutdown, for example, you have to get a bit creative with your deployment strategies.