Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really enjoy the dissonance between startup mythology (bold innovators who play by nobody's rules) and the very conservative reality, as expressed in eligibility criteria like this. Think different, in one of the approved ways. Why this part of our industry is exempt from disruption, while everything else is fair game, is a source of constant wonder to me.
I feel obligated to point out that Microsoft Bizspark will give you free software/services for 3 years and it is "one guy working from his kitchen table"-friendly. If you're building things, they will give you stuff. Bonus: You can help support underdog upstarts like Microsoft against uncaring tech titans like Google.
I am really leery of these various clouds. They are like architectural catnip-using them requires you to use an order of magnitude greater resources than you would on a single server, but it's really fun to assemble the moving parts.
I feel like some people don't fully recognize how much you can do on a single tiny machine in 2014 if you don't have 29 abstraction layers under you.
It's not just that the cloud stuff is inefficient, but that it's so much fun to write services across ten ephemeral nodes and play with all the cool tooling, instead of hanging your head and learning the simple apache config that will enable you to do the equivalent stuff on a budget linode.