Amazon has announced a new feature called AWS CloudFormation, providing the capability to create complex systems (called Stacks) using one function call in programming. The stack will be described using a template in the form of a JSON string, which in turn is used to build the stack in the proper order. If it cannot create the stack for some kind of reason it will initiate a rollback by default.
The Stack can consist of multiple EC2 instances, containing security groups, Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and Elastic IPP addresses if needed. The stack can also contain Load Balancers, Auto Scaling Groups, Relational Database Service (RDS) instances and security groups, Simple Notification Service (SNS) topics and subscriptions, CloudWatch alarms, Simple Queue Service (SQS) message queues and SimpleDB domains.
Once build the stack retains its identity after it has been created, so it can be shut it all down when you no longer need it, making it an ideal solution for creating develop, test and acceptance environments.
The AWS Management Console also fully supports CloudFormation.