DevOps here! Very much this. You can use Jenkins with Packer Builder and a configuration management tool of your choice to build an AMI for each code deployment (AMI generation costs nothing except for the space of the AMI). Need to scale 100 instances in <5 minutes? EASY.
What you don't want to do is attempt to scale, and you can't reach Github, or you overwhelm your configuration management tool, etc. Your AMIs should be built so they need almost nothing from external resources before being ready to serve requests.
Comments
DevOps here! Very much this. You can use Jenkins with Packer Builder and a configuration management tool of your choice to build an AMI for each code deployment (AMI generation costs nothing except for the space of the AMI). Need to scale 100 instances in <5 minutes? EASY.
What you don't want to do is attempt to scale, and you can't reach Github, or you overwhelm your configuration management tool, etc. Your AMIs should be built so they need almost nothing from external resources before being ready to serve requests.