Well these are certainly the days of Platform As A Service (PAAS), and imagine we are just really seeing the beginning of the compute cloud.  Though the definition of what is really a Platform is probably up for grabs, and Google are in the game now.   Though what is really exciting is the speed at with which we are seeing adoption and effect are now reflection of an Enterprise 2.0 world (maybe this is now Adoption 2.0 - a new world where we can see adoption of a technology realtime).  

The really exciting thing here is the number of players (Morph, Bungee, Heroku, RightScale) since the more the minds converge the more we see the benefits broaden.  At Exist we have been using Morph as a platform for our clients,  it allows us to immediately deploy client sites and then collaborate in a kinda UAT environment which is both easy and quick.  This kind of Infrastructure-on-demand is really a huge benefit - the virtual nature plays so easily in the hands of a collaboration based development company.

What is also important is it fits with out Web 2.0 tooling - as a company we actually choose the environment with the client (it can be anything from BaseCamp or JIRA and our dev teams are up on lots of tools).  The approach is always agile and that usually means a number of environments - Suddenly we are switching up from lots of servers to leveraging the cloud where it is a real blessing.  Real-time development without the hassle of deployment and administration,  giving our sys-admins the chance to work on strategic plans rather than operational needs.

With Morph getting ready to IPO in the Philippines it will be an exciting time to Rails developers looking to push products to market faster than ever.