# Mulitple EC2 Provisioning - Do All or Do One and Make AMI?

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/mulitple-ec2-provisioning-do-all-or-do-one-and-make-ami/16144>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [September 8, 2014, 11:00am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/mulitple-ec2-provisioning-do-all-or-do-one-and-make-ami/16144 "2014-09-08T11:00:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Shih\_Oon\_Liong2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/90ced4/32.png) [@Shih\_Oon\_Liong2](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Shih_Oon_Liong2)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 11:00am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/mulitple-ec2-provisioning-do-all-or-do-one-and-make-ami/16144/1 "2014-09-08T11:00:09Z")

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I was wondering what is everyone’s experience with provisioning multiple EC2 instances with Ansible. I am contemplating between two methods.

Example I want to provision 10 instances. Should I

- provisioning 10 EC2 instances, then set them up all 10 via Ansible at once. I know we can speed this up just by increasing the number of parallel job in the ansible playbook
- OR provision 1 EC2 instance, then up that one master with Ansible. Then make an AMI copy of that EC2 instance, and then launch 9 more with that AMI instead.

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**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan1)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 9:35pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/mulitple-ec2-provisioning-do-all-or-do-one-and-make-ami/16144/2 "2014-09-08T21:35:13Z")

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Ultimately it depends how different they are from each other.

Each can be good approaches.

If you are wanting to build an image with Ansible, ec2\_ami (Ansible’s module), Packer, or aminator could be useful options to look into.

A lot of folks have a base image and then will have ansible configure it the rest of the way and make sure configurations are up to date – though I always do like live configuration, because it seems useful to have the latest security updates and such.