AMIs are really useful for production servers when you want to quickly launch a bunch of similar servers or set up auto-scaling groups to launch new servers based on load. The issue is that to take full advantage of using AMIs, you need to re-build (bake) the AMI every time you make a change to your production machines.
Disadvantages of AMIs are that they are large files (which can be unwieldy) and are not in a format that can be immediately used in a vagrant instance or elsewhere, so you need to convert between AMI and .vbox or .box formats to use amis with your local vagrant instance.
With saltstack, you can deploy and configure machines from base Ubuntu or RHEL distros by using salty-vagrant for vagrant instances and salt-cloud for AWS / rackspace / openstack / vps machines. Once machines are deployed and connected to your salt-master, you can use your yaml config files to bring all the machines to the desired roles (api machine, load balancer, web front-end, etc.). This is more flexible than using AMIs, since you can roll out a minor change quickly to all servers, including production servers, without needing to wait to build a new AMI.
There are hybrid approaches also (some puppet/chef users do this) where for production machines you can have saltstack deploy to a machine that then gets built into a new AMI automatically. And then this new AMI gets updated into the autoscaling groups and is deployed to replace the current production servers. Sounds complicated... and it is, but at the cost of extra complexity it does give you the best of both worlds.
Thanks,
Sounds like the last option seems the best indeed. My salt configuration is way too slow to build to be used in an autoscaling scenario, that's one reason why AMI seemed suitable to me, but that last combination you mentioned (which i didn't know was possible) looks great.
Disadvantages of AMIs are that they are large files (which can be unwieldy) and are not in a format that can be immediately used in a vagrant instance or elsewhere, so you need to convert between AMI and .vbox or .box formats to use amis with your local vagrant instance.
With saltstack, you can deploy and configure machines from base Ubuntu or RHEL distros by using salty-vagrant for vagrant instances and salt-cloud for AWS / rackspace / openstack / vps machines. Once machines are deployed and connected to your salt-master, you can use your yaml config files to bring all the machines to the desired roles (api machine, load balancer, web front-end, etc.). This is more flexible than using AMIs, since you can roll out a minor change quickly to all servers, including production servers, without needing to wait to build a new AMI.
There are hybrid approaches also (some puppet/chef users do this) where for production machines you can have saltstack deploy to a machine that then gets built into a new AMI automatically. And then this new AMI gets updated into the autoscaling groups and is deployed to replace the current production servers. Sounds complicated... and it is, but at the cost of extra complexity it does give you the best of both worlds.