On the upside, the #devops cloud infrastructure is such that it's much easier to spin up iron...
...or to coin a word, "precipitation" (if it's in the cloud).
I got my #VPS builds to about 30min...that's from the time you register an account, to when you have a fully functional system.
Now, it takes longer if you have a load balanced stack and distributed database, and while I have no first hand knowledge of complex #cloud infrastructure, from my cursory investigation, the most time demanding sink would be moving your massive database.