One man's 'cloud onboarding time' is another's 'undifferentiated heavy lifting'. Increasingly, it seems that the man-years we've collectively invested in EC2's

One man's 'cloud onboarding time' is another's 'undifferentiated heavy lifting'. Increasingly, it seems that the man-years we've collectively invested in EC2's bizarre APIs were entirely for their own development convenience, rather than actually being their best practice. The complexity of AMIs vs the simplicity of cloning disk images - there's little practical difference other than the latter is obviously simpler and more powerful. And the latter has existed for 15 years, if not a lot longer.