amis

I do use Chef and Capistrano to automate creating AMIs, but then I like to just save the AMIs and boot from them.

The complexity of AMIs vs the simplicity of cloning disk images - there's little practical difference other than the latter is obviously simpler and more powerful.

Kingsley Amis wrote what was probably the best description of a hangover, as recounted by Dick Cavett here...

Packer is great for generating AMIs, particularly if you're already using some form of config mgmt.

And those companies might be completely justified because the benefits of Docker versus Amazon AMIs/RPMs/DEBs/etc.

Management: We create AMIs using Packer.

I would think Redis-as-the-entire-VM would be less to think about, operation-wise, at least if your cloud or data-center templates its VMs with something like EC2 AMIs.

We bake the container into the AMI, so no fetch is necessary at spin up (there is no cost to generate AMIs, only storage fees, so cost is not an issue).

We use the Atlassian stack here (stash, bamboo, etc) and deploy to AWS (regular AMIs rather than any of that fancy docker stuff).

Packer is used to build the AMIs with the containers built-in, and Docker is used both in Prod (single container to each AMI) and Dev (Docker Compose to bring up entire dev env locally).

There is a bit of trickery that I had to learn to auto mount EBS volumes when my AMIs start up - some Ruby scripting code I probably won't have to use anymore.

I went through the instance store image creation steps a long time ago for a project that deployed on custom AMIs and it was pretty convoluted; we ended up going EBS-backed and skipping the instance store altogether.

Still using docker to streamline deployments though, but one docker container/role per instance, no "orchestration" for containers (baked AMIs, ASGs).

At my last gig we built out a Mesos cluster and were deploying Docker containers, but we couldn't answer "how do we practically secure this to the same level as independent virtual machines?" and, finding no good answer, we went back to auto-scaling groups and baked AMIs.

Reminds me of Career Move, in Martin Amis' 2000 collection Heavy Water and Other Stories.