[pm90]

If you're using Ansible for orchestration, you could try using the cloud's orchestration service instead. e.g. Rackspace Cloud Orchestration, AWS Cloudformation etc. In this specific case, you can use the orchestration api to spin up and manage the servers, and use ansible to manage the software (although there is a way to manage software as well [0]; I'm just not familiar enough with it to suggest it)

Disclaimer: I work in the Cloud Orchestration team at Rackspace.

[0]: https://github.com/openstack/heat-templates/tree/master/hot/...

[ryan_lane]

Cloudformation is a shit-show. I wrote the boto_* modules in SaltStack to avoid using Cloudformation. It does magical shit like "oh, you wanted to change this one value? I'm going to rebuild entire portions of your cloud."