[jseifer]

The figure that are stated in the article are quite obviously made up but conceivably close to real life scenarios. I think the author is way off on the last example, though: "It then takes just one person a few days to provision new resources from IT or a fast-moving hosting company, install the default web stack, and do the initial deploy." I can see that for an IT department but not for a fast-moving hosting company. With all of the deployment tools available, most of the deployments I've done have ranged from a few minutes (RailsMachine) to a few hours (barebones install). All that aside, though, instant deployment would be pretty darn cool.