Abstract: On-demand cloud-based staging environments can be rapidly created as mirrors of a production environment. By defaulting to the production environment's parameters but allowing the user to edit parameters before creating the new cloud-based staging environment, much of the work of creating staging environments can be automated. Users can create staging environments quickly and easily, so that environments can be used for a single project and dismissed, instead of having to maintain them and continuously synchronize them with changes in the production environment.