When you set up a stack in OpsWorks, does it lock in the current built-in cookbooks version or will it use the most up-to-date version each time a lifecycle event is triggered?
For custom cookbooks, I understand that OpsWorks caches the provided recipes when they are provided rather than fetching the newest version each time, but I wonder if the same is true for the built-in cookbooks.
I'm concerned about this for a few reasons. What if the cookbooks are updated to install a different version of Apache or PHP or slightly vary their default configuration? What if I then setup a new instance in a layer in which the old recipe was used and end up with multiple servers with slightly different configurations?
Also there doesn't appear to be a way to customize which PHP5 version gets installed, so am I just at the mercy of the ubuntu package managers' decision to use the latest stable version?
I do want to continue using the latest and greatest software versions, but I would like to deploy them on my own time after I have been able to test that my application works in the new version.