A couple of jobs ago I have spent plenty of time optimizing a Packer-based AMI pipeline that was similar in spirit to that which you've described. It was all qu

A couple of jobs ago I have spent plenty of time optimizing a Packer-based AMI pipeline that was similar in spirit to that which you've described. It was all quite frustrating, but then the job got yanked from underneath me, so I never finished solving the problem. The article contains a screenshot[1] of a response from AWS support indicating that only EC2's own AMIs benefit from this pooling optimization. It follows that custom AMIs must take the startup time hit all the way. [1]: https://maishsk.com/blog/images/20190307_aws_ec2_secret/forum_post_slow.png https://maishsk.com/blog/images/20190307_aws_ec2_secret/foru...