You both should take a look at Salt Cloud. Since you are already working with Python Jake it may be worth looking into. The project is doing a lot of the same things and it has the advantage of bootstrapping with Salt.
If you build a few map files using salt-cloud, you have a quick vagrant-ish setup that you can start/stop/destroy with ease. Super easy to have a whole test cluster boot up for quick test/dev work. Fyi, salt is really awesome for people looking for alternatives to chef/puppet: http://saltstack.org