[scottvdp]

The baked AMI comes up and pulls, so it doesn't need to be baked each time.

If you take the route you just mentioned, I highly recommend using Netflix's Asgard (https://github.com/Netflix/asgard) and check out their recently released Aminator (https://github.com/Netflix/aminator). Asgard specifically makes AMI based deploys outrageously easy.