Unfortunately, we're not quite there yet in terms of market maturity.

This does lead back to the question of "How do I get # NICs in a configuration of <foo>?"  In an ideal world this would be possible, but unfortunately, right now the way that IaaS systems are being designed is unquestionably limited in scope.  For one thing, most of them tie things like the # of NICs and the network configuration directly to the underlying physical infrastructure's topology, which is clearly wrong.  They do this because the technology is not quite there to allow a true abstraction layer between the physical network topology and the logical cloud network topology on top of it.

We need very flexible network virtualization capabilities like those possible with OpenFlow.  I'm afraid this is a ways out as most of the incumbent network hardware manufacturers (Cisco, Juniper, et al) are too blind to see a future where network hardware is as big a commodity as the x86 platform.  Not to mention it's a huge threat to their business models.

But I'm jumping way ahead of myself.  I'll outline this in detail in some blog postings in the near future.

Thanks,

--Randy