When I play around with Puppet changes, I usually create an instance, apply Puppet classes and change the manifests incrementally. When I hit a dead end or want to confirm that my change applies cleanly on a new instance, I delete the old instance, create a new one, apply the changed Puppet classes and test if it still works.

Unfortunately, currently creating, deleting and configuring an instance requires manual web interaction which makes this development cycle more time-consuming than needed.

It would be nice if the creation, deletion and configuration of instances was exposed via the web API so that it could be scripted. As deleting an instance in the web UI already invokes an AJAXy dialog, there seems to exist some foundation for that, but it should cover other common use cases as well.