I don't really follow you here; AWS is infrastructure. So all the chef/puppet stuff has to happen anyway. The benefit of AWS is that you have some immediate bo

I don't really follow you here; AWS is infrastructure. So all the chef/puppet stuff has to happen anyway. The benefit of AWS is that you have some immediate bootstrap, and simple auto scaling. This last is a killer feature. Being able to scale your caches and load balances silently, based on metrics, is a real time and money saver. Sure. You need to have a level of scale to need that :) but when you do, AWS can have some good features.