cloud-init is a standard tool in most cloud computing environments as it's an easy way to provide configuration for provisioning server instances. You provide a YAML config file and it'll use the data to configure the server as needed.

Testing cloud-init in a public can be a bit problematic and …

Vagrant is a great tool for creating development environments and testing deployment scripts, especially with Ansible. Testing an Ansible playbook is can be as simple as vagrant up.