An early Christmas present for you!
We’ve been rethinking how Chef can be used to bootstrap machines and create test environments, and an early prototype–the chef-metal gem–has come out of that thinking. The long explanation is here. The short form is, imagine writing this in a recipe and having the machine show up, converged, in EC2, VirtualBox, or LXC:
machine 'luigi' do recipe 'apache' recipe 'mywebapp' end
It can reliably create instances on EC2 (via Fog) and VMs in vagrant at the moment. This is extremely alpha, and will change as it develops, but we wanted to get it into your hands for any holiday hacking fun :)