An interesting path to SAAS

I've spent a lot of my life taking care of computers...it's a thankless job.  Some who know me may remember my time @ Corio.  I was there and left before anything really worked - but I loved the concept...However, it was really hard.  At Ambleside, we an active customer of SAAS apps - multiple services from Quickbooks, Autotask, Google Docs - even some of D-Tools is basically SAAS.

I don't like our wiki though - basecamp never worked for us and the other stuff from them is a little too basic, google pages is also a little limiting...One of our customers companies uses JIRA for there issue tracker and I really like how it works and looks.  So, when Atlassian offered JIRA and Confluence licenses recently for $5 (!), I jumped at it - even though we don't have a decent server.

Atlassian put together an installer to put the whole thing onto Amazon EC2!  It took about 20 minutes but now I have a world-class production back-end, scalable, with a truly fantastic enterprise tool.  It's even running a Postgres back-end (thanks Wei!)  

Amazon charges around $80/month but that drops to $15/mo w/ a 3-year committment...The charges are by the hour so while I'm playing, I just suspend when not using it.

This is so cool on so many levels.....