Yes it is a pain to bake your AMI that much, but the upside is you autoscale faster. When you can scale faster you can set your thresholds higher because you k

Yes it is a pain to bake your AMI that much, but the upside is you autoscale faster. When you can scale faster you can set your thresholds higher because you know a new instance will be ready to serve traffic through ELB faster. Granted node and nginx don't take long to run an update on. But the more you keep piling on updates the slower your true "time to ready" increases. And that can take a while from ec2 launch to ELB registration. Why not have best of both and use puppet/chef to create your AMI anytime they require a security update?