1. A method comprising: at a computer system provided within a virtualization service, receiving a configuration request, the computer system executing a first version of a computing application, the virtualization service facilitating a cloud computing architecture, the cloud architecture facilitating loading one or more machine images containing description of the computing application onto one or more physical machines and making the computing application accessible via a network; in response to the configuration request, retrieving a configuration object, the configuration object stored by the computing application and comprising executable code and metadata; and automatically, using the configuration object, installing a configuration associated with the configuration object to produce a second version of the computing application, the second version of the computing application running within the virtualization service.