A cloud computing environment with the ability to deploy a web application that has been developed using one of a plurality of application frameworks and is configured to execute within one of a plurality of runtime environments can be delivered as a self-contained virtual machine disk image configured to launch in a virtualization environment. Upon request (or alternatively, in a pre-processing phase), a cloud computing platform provider can compose a virtual machine disk image comprising the cloud computing environment. The virtual machine disk image may be attached to any virtual machine, whether running on a personal computing device such as a laptop or in an infrastructure-as-a-service service provider to provide a cloud computing environment that is automatically configured to receive and deploy a web application.