I investigated EBS snapshot as an option, but there were two problems. 1) cost as i mentioned initially - for just AOSP source tree alone you are looking at > 250GB and at a cost of $0.05 per GB you are already at > $10/month and 2) EBS snapshots lazy load from S3 which gives TERRIBLE performance which means you end up with far far slower builds. AWS released a feature "EBS Fast Snapshot Restore" to workaround this issue, but it's extremely expensive.