Josh Hunt's questions

I'm having trouble defining instance type and security groups through .ebextensions/*.config files in the root of my application bundle.

Briefly, I have two config files that look like this:

.ebextensions/01-options.config:

option_settings:
  [...]
  - namespace: 'aws:elasticbeanstalk:application:environment'
    option_name: CONFIG_FILE_ONE
    value: '01-options.config'
  [...]

and .ebextensions/02-app-test-env.config:

option_settings:
  - namespace: 'aws:elasticbeanstalk:application:environment'
    option_name: NODE_ENV
    value: 'Test'

  - namespace: 'aws:elasticbeanstalk:application:environment'
    option_name: CONFIG_FILE_TWO
    value: '02-app-test-env'

  - namespace: aws:autoscaling:launchconfiguration
    option_name: InstanceType
    value: t2.micro

  - namespace: aws:autoscaling:launchconfiguration
    option_name: SecurityGroups
    value: sg-ys75dfs2

Now, the environment variables are being set, so I know it's reading both config files, but the security group and instance type aren't being set - even when I rebuild the environment, instances are still created as t1.micro with default security groups - my settings aren't being applied.

What am I missing here? How can I define the instance type using .config files?

I find i am constantly settings up pretty much nearly identical servers and VPSs for a number of my clients and it can be very time consuming. Often the only thing that changes between each deployment is the different website that is to be served. Is there an easy way to automate all this and take the boring monotony of setting up 56 identical servers?

The servers i have deployed so far have only been Ubuntu, but it may be possible that i start to use other linux OSs or even Windows. So far i have looked at Capistrano, but it seems to be focused on writing little ruby programs to do the job with, and i have no knowledge at all