How to improve OpsWorks node's boot time?

amazon-web-services, aws-opsworks, boot, chef-infra

Solution

In my case, using m1.small, I followed this doc to create a custom AMI.

I think the reason it kept booting forever is the opsworks-agent files are still there. See step 4 under To create a custom AMI from an AWS OpsWorks instance, you'd need to stop agent and delete it's files.

The complete cycle improved from ~25 minutes down to ~10 minutes. By the ~11th minute, it's on LB health checks stage.

Hope that helps.

Problem

I like AWS OpsWorks but one big drawback I am facing now is boot time: nodes are booting super slowly. In my case, for a t1.micro instance, it takes like 10 minutes before my cookbook can start running (although from EC2 console view, the instance should be ready after about 2 minutes: it can be accessed via SSH after this short period). You can also refer to this topic. I tried using custom AMI but ran into another problem: the node kept booting forever. But that might be my fault while creating the AMI. Back to the original question, how can I improve this boot time of OpsWorks nodes?

Original source