Rent the box for the day of the hackathon

The company hackathon is Friday. Eighty people, twenty teams, and nobody wants to lose the first two hours to installs.

Thursday night, ops rents one server on the one-day tier and builds a template container: the repos, the toolchain, a seeded database, a snapshot. Friday at nine, a loop copies the template twenty times and posts twenty code URLs into twenty Slack channels. Every team opens theirs in whatever they brought: company laptops, personal Macs, one person on an iPad. Same environment, zero setup.

At six the demos run from the same URLs. Saturday the rental reaches rental_end, sits through its hold period, and is deprovisioned. Nobody writes a cleanup script. Nobody discovers an instance still running in November.