IMO it's better for autoscaling to bake VM images and use cloud-init or similar to add per-instance config tweaks if necessary. Using Ansible to do runtime conf

IMO it's better for autoscaling to bake VM images and use cloud-init or similar to add per-instance config tweaks if necessary. Using Ansible to do runtime configuration is slow and doesn't play well with autoscaling. I do like Ansible, however, and use it for building EC2 AMIs. I even wrote a tool for this purpose at https://github.com/cloudboss/bossimage https://github.com/cloudboss/bossimage.