Also, I'm a moron. Please mentally substitute all my references to e2c with ec2. e2c was a load-balancing technique in the 90s and I constantly get the two mixed up. For specific information about how ec2 works you should check
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#functionality
The most relevant highlight is "Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously."
Creating thousands of instances manually in minutes would be quite a feat.