talltofu

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on what the right 'cloudy' way of doing things are. Should I spin up a VM on the cloud and use it forever like I do with a physical machine? Or should I constantly spin up and spin down VMs daily? My VMs are stateless.

Are there organizations that have chosen one path or the other and have had success? Links to blogs/articles would be appreciated

I have hired from Elance and ODesk before and in my opinion, it seems that the really good devs stay away from it. I have a specific need for an iOS dev with good knowledge of the real time (low latency) Core Audio libraries. It is a very basic app otherwise. Any thoughts how I can go about finding a person like that?

I got a friend recommendation from Facebook that has me worried about how intrusive it is. This is a person with whom I have NO mutual friends. I only know him because our kids attend swim lessons at the same time (along with 30 other kids). Here is the kicker though, I have not communicated with him using any digital source. We only talk when we meet and have just exchanged phone numbers once but never called each other. I don't know his email/twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook details and he does not know mine.

So here is my question - how does Facebook figure out that I have interacted with him? Sure, we both pay for the swim lessons with a credit card so they can parse through that and figure out that we pay for the same activity. But then why is he the only one on the recommended friend list? Why isn't another parent (who I don't interact with that much) also on there?

Any thoughts?