* How can I set up an environment without spending an entire week on it? - Cloud formation would be a good bet here * How can I make installing everything as e

* How can I set up an environment without spending an entire week on it? - Cloud formation would be a good bet here * How can I make installing everything as easy as possible? - Use hosted chef and community cookbooks These suggestions might be pretty daunting if you havent used chef or autoscaling/cloudformation before. Alternatively you could hack this all and bake an ami and clone it. Look at using something with a higher granularity of metics than cloudwatch (resolution is 5 minutes), like graphite and collectd to collect stats easily.