Immutable Deployments and Packer

A correcter title for this series would be something along the lines of "Automating autoscaled zero-downtime immutable deployments using plain old bash, Packer, nginx, Node.js, and AWS", but that would've been kind of long (although it does fit on a tweet). My last article on the subject was two years ago, when I wrote about Deploying Node apps to AWS using Grunt. Here's a long overdue update, containing everything I've learned about deployments in the time since then.