I've got a dozen or so EBS backed instances of various sizes in a VPC, multiple security groups, route53 for internal name service.
I'd like to clone the whole thing to another availability zone. Has anyone done such a thing? OpsWorks appears to have that feature. Has anyone used it?
CloudFormer and CloudFormation would be good tools for this.
CloudFormer lets you create AWS CloudFormation templates from resources that are already existing in your account. These generated templates are basically just JSON that expresses each type of resource that CloudFormer examined. You can then take the generated template as a base, tweak the configuration of each resource as you need, and then use the template to launch those resources.
Resources:
I started using Terraform and the Terraform import tool called Terraforming. I find them much more to my liking. For one thing Terraform allows iterative changes while Cloudformation seems to want to refresh the whole stack when things change. I also find the Terraform syntax and documentation quite approachable. I'm particularly fond of variable abstraction and interpolation options. I've created core stack templates which can be re-used in various environments.