We do this too. Another nice advantage is changes to the production machine state are all in source control. We deploy on EC2 + our own .deb. The entire .deb re

We do this too. Another nice advantage is changes to the production machine state are all in source control. We deploy on EC2 + our own .deb. The entire .deb recipe is checked into source, right next to the rest of our source code. There's no wondering about when a specific change got added to the AMI.