You need to look into sysadmin's toolbelt, then. Sysadmins use configuration management systems (CFEngine, for example) for quite long time now. The only thing

You need to look into sysadmin's toolbelt, then. Sysadmins use configuration management systems (CFEngine, for example) for quite long time now. The only thing you need is to put a post-create script (however it is called in AWS), which would install and deploy such system and let the system configure the machine. I know it's not sexy for developers to take advice from sysadmins, but at the end of the day, it gets the job done reliably and elegantly.