Cloud platforms have revolutionized workflows for developers and operations by allowing temporary infrastructure for testing, eliminating the need for local virtual machines and enabling scalable testing. The blog post by Matthew Casperson details creating Windows and Linux EC2 instances using CloudFormation templates within their own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), emphasizing the importance of network configurations such as Internet gateways, security groups, and route tables, which have become best practice requirements. It includes examples of CloudFormation templates for both Windows and Linux, highlighting the differences in security group rules and user data scripts while ensuring the EC2 instances maintain a static IP through elastic IPs. By utilizing VPCs, users can access newer instance types and create isolated environments where multiple VMs can communicate with each other. The templates serve as a self-service tool to deploy VMs in AWS, supporting newer instance types that are not compatible with the EC2-Classic environment, allowing enhanced communication and isolation among VMs.