I've been using Ansible in an EC2 environment and it's been fantastic. It's powerful enough, but its requirements are slight and you don't end up fussing with

I've been using Ansible in an EC2 environment and it's been fantastic. It's powerful enough, but its requirements are slight and you don't end up fussing with bootstrapping it into being. A server with Python (and a few little things that can be installed via Ansible/Python) will get you to a place where your instances are being populated.