Coder Chris has posted a great guide on using Amazon S3 as a source code file-store and syncing code updates out to instances on restart. This has a funky name "Rolling Thunder". Quote: I've been using a common technique to deploy source code updates to my Amazon EC2 instances for some time now, which makes use of S3 as a central source code file-store, and syncs updates out to instances on a restart. I didn't however know that this technique had a name: Rolling Thunder (Thanks AWS Tech Summit) As it was such a cool buzz wordy term, I thought I'd post a guide to how I achieve Rolling Thunder on AWS using CentOS Linux based instances (though this should work with any *NIX variant) in case anyone new to the game wanted a how-to. Read more over on Chris's blog here: http://www.coderchris.com/aws/aws-rolling-thunder-in-centos-linux/2011/04/11