There are lots of things going on for Perl right now on the deployment/cloud front. DotCloud, Phenona, now Stakato. This, coupled with web frameworks like Mojolicious and Dancer, make me very happy and optimistic that Perl is entering a new phase, fixing any publicity issues it had. A renaissance of sorts if you will.
Absolutely. Perl on DotCloud was a huge success: no other service on our platform has seen such rapid and massive adoption!
Perl hackers are much more experienced on average, they typically master more than one language, and they are extremely good at documenting and helping each other out [1] [2] [3].