Thanks for getting started on this! There's not a very good way to test changes to this CloudFormation-stack at this point- this template is for the 'production' CloudFormation stack which includes the extra AWS resources not used/needed for the self-contained adhoc-instance case (where we tend to either stub or provision resources on the standalone instance directly, e.g., mysql, redis, etc.). I've only loosely been using it to maintain our production infrastructure so far, and only manually with careful attention to every update - it's not yet fully integrated or hooked up to our automated CI build or anything yet.

So actually deploying this change to the production stack is something I'll have to do manually, I'll try to do this in the near future.

The cloud_formation_adhoc_standalone template sets up the adhoc-instance resources, so if you wanted to test out hooking up an SQS resource to an adhoc instance, that's the template to modify (the template can be modified locally, then launched with rake adhoc:start as usual). With the synchronous-processing fallback in place it sounds like we might not need SQS added to the adhoc stack at this point, but it wouldn't be too difficult to add if we needed to. (We could also make it optionally available, along the lines of the cdn_enabled flag in the current template..)

@wjordan is this still useful / worth pursuing?