Thank you so much for these posts, fpgaminer. They've been extremely helpful to me in framing how these things could be used.

Once upon a time I thought seriously about going in to hardware design. I took a couple different courses in college (over 10 years ago now... sigh) dealing with VHDL and/or verilog and entirely loved it. If not for a chance encounter with web programming during my co-op my career would have been entirely different. With AWS offering this in the cloud if it is not prohibitively expensive I'll be looking in to toying with it and hopefully discovering uses for it in my work.