[ryanfitz]

Recently, I switched to pre-baking AMIs and then launching those images with auto scaling groups. This has simplified and sped up our deploys substantially (and reduced our costs), we can go from code commit to deployed on production in about 90 seconds.

Netflix has talked about a similar approach. The basic process is to have volumes from existing AMIs already mounted to your buildbox. Then when you kick off a build it checks out your code, compiles and installs it on one of those volumes, runs puppet in a chroot on the volume to do any needed configuration. Finally you unmount the volume and create a fully bootable AMI. I scripted this up in python and the baking process takes around 60 seconds.