[malraux]

How are you building your AMIs?

We're using Ansible and building the AMIs on a dedicated ec2 instance (started for a build and shut down afterwards). The AMIs are fully baked and environment information is configured via user_data in the launch configuration.

We use SSH to communicate with the build instance as a result, but I'd rather spend time during the build than during start-up of a new instance.

[markhellewell]

Not the person you asked the question of, but we’re building AMIs (and VMware images) using packer.io (via the masterless puppet provisioner). It works nicely and with a minimum of fuss.