[one-users] Concise guide to getting started with my own instances: from ISO's to n VM's

[Jaco]

Hi folks.

I've finally managed to get functional stacks going - it seems that I 
needed to specify a 'target' (sda, sdz, etc) to storage media (DS, OS, 
CD) I attach to vm's/template - not sure if this is indicated anywhere, 
as what I did find online seems to simply imply this, as those values 
were omitted (bug?).

I'm able to spin up a VM from ISO & do an installation to a 2nd disk - 
so rw-I/O & permissions looks OK for now.
Starting instances from images downloaded from the market looks good too.

What I'd like to request is some concise but comprehensive guide to 
getting started with this process please, as I think I'm missing 
something in the workflow, and the documentation on contextualisation 
does not seem appropriate yet.

What I need to do is:
* upload an ISO ('check')
* define some datastore to install the base OS to (eg. building 
primordial JeOS, Atom, CoreOS, etc), and what characteristics to set: 
OS/DataStore, persistent, etc?
* defining the template for the base installer
* instantiating new instance & installing OS/stack (simple enough, so 
'check')
* after base-install, I'll look at adding the contextualization 
'magic-sauce' (already RTFM'ing that) - possibly commiting to the market
* how to I then take what I've done, how to manipulate it to create 
snapshot/template of the OS disk as an appliance, and spin up my own 
baby-instances from that?
* bonus: pushing my appliance to AWS, export for transport to vBox, 
abstracting for LXC, etc. - eg. pointing to anything else that's cool I 
can do.

I'm sure this is documented or blogged somewhere, but I'm unsure where 
to find this (something that would've included details I had missed 
initially).
I'm OK doing this in CLI, but I would like to do as much in SunStone GUI 
as I can - partly for testing-purposes, but also because I need to share 
this with others I'd prefer not giving POSIX CLI shell.
Can someone please point me in the right direction, so that I can go 
from a clean slate & ISO's in-hand to n-number VM's?

Any help would be appreciated.

Kind regards

- J