You can speed up AMI baking by using chroot + a mounted EBS volume on a running instance. It should drastically reduce the time it takes to produce a new image.

You can speed up AMI baking by using chroot + a mounted EBS volume on a running instance. It should drastically reduce the time it takes to produce a new image. Also be sure that you're building EBS-backed AMI's, as S3-backed AMI's will require a lot of time for copy.