Looking back at the previous stamp pattern, we created an image of a virtual machine at a point where it made many things easier, including scaling out or even making one-time changes to enable the third-party software Vagrant.

A lot of times, the stamp pattern is used to solve the deployment concern of locking an image at an application state. For example, if the team deploys a web page, they might stamp the running instance after the web server has been configured with Apache, SSL, PHP, etc. However, perhaps this server requires SSL so the image is created, or stamped, after the certificate is installed. The even bigger risk is that SSL keys, SSH keys, and so on should never be left on an AMI.

Certificates change and expire over time, so this means that the machine image would become invalid at some point in its lifecycle. The best way to handle this change without having to re-package the entire virtual machine would be to separate the configuration (or certificates) from...