Make existing and future test units portable and autonomous.

[nephomaniac]

I would like to rework many of the existing test suites so that the tests can be stopped, frozen, and restarted at individual units. I'd also like the units to do a better job of identifying their own environmental prerequisites needed to run so they can be moved to other harnesses and/or test suites.

Due to the nature of systems testing many of the test units require the tests create a specific environment to test in. Leveraging existing resources has huge value in time savings and where possible, tests should do more of this. However, many of the legacy tests make assumptions about the system state and available test resources prior to running. For example to test running an instance, the system will need install an image, create keys, groups, etc. or like many existing tests, assume those resources are in place.
I suggest we attempt to use 'tags' within the system and/or external methods (db, etc) to record information about what resources and state are being or can be utilized by the tests.