We (BrowserMob) routinely launch thousands of instances on Amazon EC2 every day. Back in 2008 when I started the company, my bet was that as big as EC2 was then, it was only going to get bigger and cheaper. And boy did it! Today we're one of Amazon's largest users, in terms of peak concurrent instances/CPU cores. We don't quite do the 30K CPU cores that is referenced in this article, but we get pretty close. What's really cool is we do it all serf-service: our customers schedule load tests thatm under the covers, deploy massive amounts of hardware within minutes. It's really amazing to watch as we launch hundreds of thousands of servers every month. But as useful as load testing in the cloud is, it's still admittedly a simplistic use case that probably isn't changing the world as we know it. What I'm really excited about are all the people who now can rent supercomputers and do serious science. With Amazon's recent foray in to GPU compute clusters, I expect to see some really cool... - Patrick Lightbody