So far, we have been manually setting up our instances. This cries for automation, and maybe you have already written a shell script to download the proper version of the addons your instance needs and streamlined the process. It turns out that there is a tool meant to help with doing this called buildout. Buildout is a Python-based build system for creating, assembling, and deploying applications from multiple parts, some of which may be non-Python-based. It lets you create a buildout configuration and reproduce the same software later.
This recipe shows how you can start using buildout to ensure you have the same setup in the development and production servers.