I'm a Netflix fan, as a consumer and an engineer, and this blog post just reinforces my fanboi status. Amidst the descriptions of deployment tools and pipelines one thing stood out for me: the fact that AMI bake times are now a large factor, and that "installing packages" and the "snapshotting process" were a big piece of this. Containers are definitely the answer to this problem. You can deploy base images with the OS and common dependencies, and have the code changes be a thin final layer. Of course with such a sophisticated pipeline based on AMI deployment this change would not be trivial for Netflix, but the bottom line is they have described the primary container use case perfectly, imo.