I'd like to tell you about a project I have been working on. I believe deploying fully baked AMIs has so many advantages over half-baked or raw deployments where things happen at boot time, that I want to make it easy for everyone to do. Netflix have been doing ... Read more

There are many ways to build AMIs, and this episode will show you how to use the same process Netflix uses by using Aminator. We will then take it one step further, and build AMIs using the Ansible Provisioner as well.

Every EC2 instance has access to meta-data, which can be used in combination with cloud-init to automation processes as an instance boots. CloudFormation parameters add extra flexibility to passing data to instances, and this episode will show you how to use them all.

By using Ansible in combination with AWS, you can achieve high levels of automation quickly and easily. This episode shows you how to install Ansible, configure the EC2 inventory plugin, perform ad-hoc tasks on instances, and how to write a few playbooks to automate processes.

When you go to bed at night, you turn off the lights. When you're the last to leave the office, you turn off the lights and lock the door. This is a good habit. Yet when the weekend comes, many companies keep development and testing servers running, sitting idle ... Read more