picloud and mrjob

picloud has gone a step further in making cloud computing effortless. just install and import their module and give it a function call to execute. give it several calls in a row for embarrassingly easy, embarrassingly parallel computing. the price is right, too, at 7-9 cents/hour + 10 cents per gb of bandwidth. i figure that burns up the cost of buying a machine for one year of solid run time. no maintenance costs/time and even the hassle of dealing with amazon's cloud (setting up the server, scheduling 1 hour blocks). apparently there is a test server to try code locally before running it on their machines, so maybe i'll try it out. only question i have is whether or not they will allow anything other than pure python; ie, cython, scipy.weave, etc. mrjob looks like a similar system. worth a look.