My company is currently migrating several websites and PHP web applications (standard LAMP stack) from three in-house servers to Amazon EC2. Because we had only three servers, we clustered several low-traffic websites with perhaps one high-traffic web application, and served them from the same server. The server admin has pretty much copied the previous architecture wholesale onto the EC2 instances, simply upping the instance size to account for the highest traffic client that occupies that particular instance.

This architecture might be okay if it wasn't for deployment. Any time one of these sites/apps changes, it means redeploying the entire instance, along with the 30 sites/apps it hosts, instead of just updating one.

How can we architect our cloud in a more modular fashion? Should each app get its own appropriately-sized instance? What is the best strategy for deployment in this type of situation?