> you can instead push your artifacts to an s3 target

This is our tactic. I tried to do baked AMIs at one point, but the 10-15 minute turnaround in registering them meant that we couldn't use them for staging or testing (too long to iterate changes).

Previously we were capistrano-deploying with git from bitbucket - every server had to individually git pull from servers on the other side of the continent, over the public internet. Susceptible to all sorts of problems.