Man, I really dig cloud-based computing infrastructure. It was made my life as CTO of a SaaS lots easier. The ability to grow new infrastructure with out having to order equipment, service and wait for install has made us more agile.
We are currently using Amazon's EC2. One of the neatest things for me is how this really enables smooth upgrades of our production software. When we are ready to do a release, we grow new "candidate" systems - front end serves and databases. The candidate systems are populated with the new code and "smoke" tested by QA and development. When cut over time comes around, we simply shutdown previous version front end servers, move data over, move the dynamic IP addresses to point to the new systems and we are off and running. We keep around the old systems just in case, and decommission them about a week later.
Very cool.
