We used to have more details in a previous version of the site, but people complained it was too much information and got confused :) It is something that we n

We used to have more details in a previous version of the site, but people complained it was too much information and got confused :) It is something that we need to improve. For now, you can take a look at the Readme and Changelog documents in each one of the application installer and virtual machine sections. It provides detailed information on bundled versions. But you are completely right that we need to make this information more accessible to end users that are interested in it. We ship nginx, PHP-FPM with our LAMP and Rails stacks, but not enabled by default. We prefer Apache by default because it is much more rich in functionality, it works equally well in OS X, Win and Linux, people are used to configuring it, and with Apache 2.4 and the new MPMs, it is very similar in performance to nginx. Varnish is disabled by default because many people use the stacks for local development (at least for installers, for AMIs I think it is enabled by default, but I need to check) When you mention app-specific optimization, what are you exactly referring to? Like a fine-tuned Magento AMI? We are working on something similar to that (incl. multi-server deployment templates) but it is difficult to come up with a one-size-fits-all configuration as performance tuning usually involves tradeoffs.