> There are a lot of shops that probably don't know how to recreate a machine from scratch.
You can't fix already broken processes. VMware solved this 20 years ago. It is pretty simple to restore VMs on different systems, you don't need to worry about the ball of mud when you can duplicate it.
You can't really serialize something like an ami. So how are you going to make an offsite backup? Things need to be relatively simple & reproducible otherwise you will get bitten in many different ways due to strategies like this.
If you want to backup an individual AMI you're probably doing it wrong. That probability goes to near certainty when you're talking about serializing it for off-site backup. Backup the deployment automation and the data, sure.
I agree, that was kind of my point. He was talking about taking VM's but in a cloud environment this is a bit more awkward. Copying and storing VM's securely is not hard, but transferring AMI's is the only rough equivalent I know of in the cloud world. Ideally, you don't have to do this. But for one part of my current stack, the configuration that this specially configured windows box has been lost for a while. Rebuilding from scratch has not worked each time it has been tried.
You can't fix already broken processes. VMware solved this 20 years ago. It is pretty simple to restore VMs on different systems, you don't need to worry about the ball of mud when you can duplicate it.