use provisioning software like chef or puppet. using knife in chef i can spawn a new rackspace instance, install and configure my entire stack, and deploy my ap

use provisioning software like chef or puppet. using knife in chef i can spawn a new rackspace instance, install and configure my entire stack, and deploy my application all in one command. i can launch an exact copy of an application in 5 - 10 minutes - during which i do nothing but sit and watch the entire chef-client run go by. it's about as turn-key as it gets. of course writing out our entire configuration process in ruby is a bit of work - but it's front-loaded work that you never have to repeat and saves you months of tweaking and copying configuration files. you can subsequently modify quite easily to fit new deployments and new applications. if you need it to be quicker you simply take a snapshot of the resulting instance and clone it to new instances.