The goal of Open-org.com is to let anyone contribute. This means that our infrastructure should facilitate this openness in the best possible way. The infrastructure should, therefore, have the following characteristics:

• Cheap (at least upfront)
  
• Easily sandboxed, so new contributors can easily be given their own sandbox to play in
  
• Scalable, so we can easily increase our capacity or the number of sandboxes given to contributors
  
• Transparent, so new contributors can easily understand what is going on
  
• Based on well-known technologies
• Flexible, so one can innovate utilizing a range of technologies
• Easy to set up an automatic test environment.

Based on these criteria, I believe that our best choice (at least at the moment) is to utilize Amazon EC2 (it is especially the last point that excludes services from Microsoft and Google, though they may have a use for specialized services). Amazon also offers a Free Tier, which means that new developers can get a sandbox of our infrastructure for free at any time. Marcus has achieved that once a Micro Instance is up and running, all the steps needed to get LampCMS and all its prerequisites installed and started are automatized using a bash script. We want to take this further to offer a web application where new developers can get a Micro Instance with a working version of LampCMS up and running by simply typing their Amazon account information and clicking a single button. The whole process should complete within five minutes.

This means that new developers can start experimenting with their own sandbox within five minutes. Now we only need to give the developers a proper IDE within the same five minutes too. Maybe ecoder is the solution to this?