> As impressive as it sounds, such a cluster can be spun up by anyone with the proper expertise, without talking to a single employee of Amazon.
This isn't actually true. There's initially an instance limit of 20, and you have to contact Amazon to get it lifted. You could probably order just as many servers at Softlayer or purchase them at Dell without talking to anyone (except the guy who confirms your credit card).
After all, they're not going to let anyone run up a $3 million bill on the hope that it'll be paid at the end of the month!
Bump ... I've had personal experience where I needed a few 100 VMs for a short experiment. A quick message to Amazon got the job done. Took less than a day to get approval.
This isn't actually true. There's initially an instance limit of 20, and you have to contact Amazon to get it lifted. You could probably order just as many servers at Softlayer or purchase them at Dell without talking to anyone (except the guy who confirms your credit card).
After all, they're not going to let anyone run up a $3 million bill on the hope that it'll be paid at the end of the month!