title: Recommended approach & tools to provision a VM instance(s) from node.js?
body: <p>I am trying to implement a '<strong>lab in the cloud</strong>' to allow people to have a sandbox to experiment and learn in; i.e. for devops (chef/puppet), installing or configuring software etc.
  I have a node.js server implementation to manage this and looking for sane and reasonable ways to attack this problem.</p>
  
  <p>The options are bewilderingly diverse: puppet or chef directly, or vagrant seems appropriate. But Openstack, cloudfoundry, Amazon EC2 also provide their own feature sets.
  Ideally a micro-cloud solution (multiple VM's per instance) would be ideal as there isn't going to be any large computational load.</p>
  
  <p>Suggestions most appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Cheers</p>