Some projects are self-contained, and for those you don't need any supporting infrastructure outside the runtime of your language. But once you start dealing with _systems_ where it's very particular about the specific version/configuration of the database or message queueing system, it's much less error-prone to have that automated. For that you need control of a whole machine, virtual or not.
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Looks like there's some cool technology here, but I'm not sure why it has to spin up a new server.
Some projects are self-contained, and for those you don't need any supporting infrastructure outside the runtime of your language. But once you start dealing with _systems_ where it's very particular about the specific version/configuration of the database or message queueing system, it's much less error-prone to have that automated. For that you need control of a whole machine, virtual or not.
I wrote a blog post about a similar approach applied to local VMs: http://technomancy.us/150
So you can't resume an instance? I only ask because some of my projects take a long time to import the initial seed data.