Create Application AMI

Decide between EBS-backed and instance store-backed. EBS starts faster, costs a bit more, storage stays around.

There are a huge number of AMIs with Ubuntu, and even a large number with Ubuntu and Nginx. So much so, that it's hard to choose. Canonical is Amazon ID: '099720109477'. There's a Canonical page for EC2: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EC2StartersGuide.

The page above talks about all sorts of environment variables to set, and stuff. But I would think that would be in the image.

I'm inclined to build our own. I'd like to say it should be hand built, but I bet we're going to discover we want a script. The dilemma is, the documentation is a script. But it's a lot easier to type in some commands to a doc, than to build a Packer script with all that entails. Talking Packer means figuring out where to split the stuff that depends on the target platform. Specifically, the stuff you need to do to use the image with Vagrant, versus what's really a provider-agnostic machine image.

Packer would let me build an AMI off line.

1. Start with the standard Ubuntu AMI
2. Add Nginx, unless there's an AMI that comes with it (probably is)
3. Add Ruby
4. Add pdftk -- Packer, or just do it manually since we'll use the AMI going forward?

Notes

• Sharing an AMI brings a tonne of other considerations: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/building-shared-amis.html