Automating the Creation of Build / Deploy Configurations

My real question:  Is there a way to create a new build configurations from a template using the Rest API?

What I am trying to do is automate creating the Build Configurations as well as all the steps to deploying to various environments, rather than creating each one seperatly. When I create a service that needs to be deployed I have to create a build for it in services > create a build for it in build packaging to be able to deploy > create a promote, deploy, and archive build for each enviroment we have.  As you can see thats a lot of manual creation for one service.  I would like to automate this.

Thanks!