at one of my projects I was been asked to set up a private cloud for a validation platform. The whole idea behind this proof of concept is based on the flexibility to spin up and down certain instances providing some specific functionality so tests banks can be ran against them.

As soon as the tests are finished the machines could be terminated. Those instances should be configured using some configuration management software, like puppet. That way the instances are rebuildable and could be treated as cattle.

On the other hand, it takes about 20 minutes to build up an …