[one-users] ONE SaveAS behaviour

[deeepdish]

HI Everyone,

Can someone please explain the concept, requirement and rationale behind the SAVEAS operation on a virtual machine instance.   I've evaluated ONE 3.2 and a bit of 3.4 so my information may be slightly dated.   ONE seems to be a very robust environment, highly flexible and customizable and simple to deploy and operate.   However I'm struggling to figure out why would one ever need to "SAVE" an instance when deploying it.   Given a cloud application, either enterprise or service provider, I would imagine that any customer provisioned instance would be persistent (I have to be careful how I use persistent -- I mean, once it's deployed, it can be stopped, rebooted, started, etc with out loosing any data -- i.e. without have to have the template redeployed).   Granted, there may be a requirement for this process flow.   Is there a way or feature in the works to alter this behavior?

My requirement is simple:

- Create standard templates;
- Customers login, pick the templates they like and deploy them.
- Once deployed, the instances are individually persistent (meaning they are around as long as the customer does not destroy them).
- The customer can power off / stop / reboot / power on / suspend / resume their instance as they wish without impacting or affecting any changes made to the instance since deployment (i.e. individually persistent).   

Think VMware, Cloudstack.  

ONE seems like a good platform, but the above has always puzzled me.   It looks like a great platform for high performance computing, perhaps not for an enterprise or service provider cloud.   Correct me if I'm wrong.