It is quite common to bring up multiple instances at once, either for testing how a system behaves as a whole or even just to reduce errors in the creation process. A new movement in the DevOps community is to treat the infrastructure itself as code. This allows the operations team to view differences between environments, see the current state, and even see what changes will affect what pieces of the environment.

AWS provides this ability through their CloudFormation service. CloudFormation allows an authorized user to deploy almost any AWS object and service, either at once or through tiered set ups using JSON templates. These templates can have input parameters, making them very generic, as well as defining dynamic resources, and producing outputs. These outputs can then be used either to give information to the user or as inputs to another CloudFormation template.