I can't speak for amazon back in '10 as we've only recently adopted the system, but I assure you this isn't the case nowadays. Launching an instance takes < 30

I can't speak for amazon back in '10 as we've only recently adopted the system, but I assure you this isn't the case nowadays. Launching an instance takes < 30 seconds and is a matter of a few clicks, the author of this post chose to use an external AMI which makes things a bit trickier and entails a few extra steps.