I don't know if I'd say the end result is the same - I haven't found an application-centric provider (ie, Azure, Heroku, GAE) that I can perform traditional dat

I don't know if I'd say the end result is the same - I haven't found an application-centric provider (ie, Azure, Heroku, GAE) that I can perform traditional data-warehousing with yet. I do a lot of database heavy work in Postgres, most of which relies on database user functions to keep things performant, and Rackspace Server / EC2 are the only methods I've found that I can actually do this. Sure, I have to do some basic sysadmin maintenance, but I'm also not running Facebook here. Some basic monitoring and a few shell scripts and I have a reliable system that serves my clients needs.