There is packer I highly recommend to use it together with salt module to do all the configuration. There is also NixOS together with NixOps it has some steep

There is packer I highly recommend to use it together with salt module to do all the configuration. There is also NixOS together with NixOps it has some steep learning curve, but I think it is worth it. You edit configuration.nix which is like Dockerfile, and then you can either use standard AMI and provide the configuration, that will result in setup similar to salt, ansible, chef etc. You can also use NixOps to provision such machine, you can then place /etc/NIXOS_LUSTRATE file which removes state after next reboot, stop it and generate AMI that essentially emulates what packer is doing. You can also use nix build to generate an image file and upload that to AWS. NixOps is also a great tool to test, you can deploy your configuration to local virtual box, or public cloud provider.