I'm new to Amazon AWS. A lot of the time I hear about people folks spawning instances and almost instantly putting them behind a load balancer and into an existing cluster.

In the traditional world of managed machines, this would include provisioning hardware, installing an OS, configuring the network on the machine and once the network is available, use a tool of your choice such as CFengine, Puppet or Chef to bootstrap the machine based on its class.

It seems like there are "shortcuts" that are able to get a server of a particular class up and running in Amazon EC2. If I have a particular stack running on my server, such as erlang, tomcat6 etc.. what's the fastest way to get these up and running and hooked into Amazon's load balancer? From network, to software stack to kernel tuning? Is it a combination of creating an AMI then running a tool like Puppet against the new instance?

Any idea