At nearForm we're also very interested in this, which is why we've been working on nscale - our own deployment solution. v0.16 was released yesterday featuring autoscaling support.

"nscale is an open toolkit supporting configuration, build and deployment of connected container sets. nscale is ideally used to support the development and operation of microservice based systems." https://github.com/nearform/nscale

Here's an interesting blog post written about the deployment immutable systems. http://www.nearform.com/nodecrunch/deployment-how-to-do-it-f...

It's only one piece of the puzzle, but at my last company I wrote deploy_thing[1] for exactly this. An immutable config bundle and an immutable artifact tag combine to create a deploy that can be launched and put into production with an AWS auto-scaling group. Need to change a configuration, you burn down the auto-scaling group. This was a transitional step for us before moving to Mesos, but it's a good example, I think, of how to approach the problem from a minimum-viable level.

(I'm currently playing with moving it to OpenStack.)

[1] https://github.com/eropple/deploy_thing

The URL is throwing 404, probably due to it being private.

Would love to see it. I am working on something similar.

It looks like it was supposed to a hyphen, not an underscore:

https://github.com/eropple/deploy-thing

Whoops, yeah. My bad, I switched from an underscore to a hyphen halfway through the project. It's still inconsistent, because we had a case of company-going-unders and I haven't needed it since.

With containers, there's http://lattice.cf , which deploys Docker containers in this style with routing and load balancing; it's a simplified version of Cloud Foundry.

With VMs, there's http://bosh.io which has a bit of a learning curve but is ground up designed to be about designing & deploying immutable software releases

Deis is relatively simple to install and get started with (http://deis.io). They have a CloudFormation config to deploy on AWS.

Make a dockerfile, make sure it works and you understand it. Then go into Elastic Beanstalk and click new application and there is an option for loading a dockerfile, boom. For you this may work, for me it's more complex.

If you are on the JVM, our service does exactly this today: https://boxfuse.com

No base images, minimal immutable images generated on the fly with only what your application needs, directly deployable on VirtualBox and AWS, with zero downtime updates using ELBs or Elastic IPs.