You need a way to declare your cluster using some orchestration tool like ansible / CloudFormation. Once you have that it's easy to setup/teardown a whole clust

You need a way to declare your cluster using some orchestration tool like ansible / CloudFormation. Once you have that it's easy to setup/teardown a whole cluster. To further separate dev/prod you can create separate VPC (virtual networks) and use IAM (ACL) to limit access. It's also possible to create an AWS account for each developer and keep an eye on the spending with consolidated billing but in practice devs often want to share infrastructure for example when testing out something together. Downtime sucks, if it happens a lot try investing in a better Internet connection. It's possible to re-use ansible formulas to deploy something locally but usually you'll end up booting machines that themselves need internet to fetch packages / dependencies anyways.