One of the nice things about being on the cloooooooooooud is that, if you've got your infrastructure managed right, a developer who wants a sandbox -- for any reason -- should be able to get one with about as much difficulty as getting office paper, and be able to bin it with about as much regret.
If you're hosting with Amazon and your application data is on its own EBS (block storage service) volume cloning your environment is easy. You can snapshot the volume, create a new volume from the snapshot, and spin up a new server (you automated provisioning, right?). That way you get a near exact replica of your environment with not too much work.
