One thing you'll notice is that Quora doesn't really give its employees any desktops. Instead, all development is done in the cloud with Amazon EC2 instances,

One thing you'll notice is that Quora doesn't really give its employees any desktops. Instead, all development is done in the cloud with Amazon EC2 instances, provisioned specifically with custom software scripts. So are all team members using the same EC2 instance? Or they each get their own different cloud-machine? (Do EC2 instances support persistence in the file system anyway?)