New and not so new technologies to build a startup

I would like to re-iterate some of the interesting ideas that Jeff Bezos threw out at startup school (google: startup school).

Building infrastructure is time consuming and wasteful for a startup. This is why many individual developers (over 350K according to Amazon's recent figures) have adopted Amazon Web Services, which allow for scaling up and scaling down, more or less transparently (programatically via API) of computing infrastructure: both in computing power and in storage (bread and butter of computing). Also in network usage (I guess that would be water, in the previous analogy).

Interestingly enough, Google is a recent newcomer to this game: it's app engine launched one month ago. I have heard that it is pretty limiting, but I do not have (for now) experience in working with AWS either.

Couple the opportunity of these infrastructure offerings with the networking power of a site like Facebook.com and you have one very compelling toolkit for a building a startup with very little money down.

Of course, you will be better off finding a framework/language that can leverage the de-centralized infrastructure of the computing cloud. Erlange comes to mind and so does mnesia. Now does anybody have a nice little set of erl bindings so wrap around AWS?