Very cool! At my previous position we spent a lot of time creating staging environments for QA and UX to use. I love the idea of having an "environment per feature" which can exist for a week while the release candidate gets checked by UX and QA.
The "spin-down" feature sounds like the killer -- the only reason we didn't have an environment per build already is because it would be cost prohibitive. Instead, we tried to time-slice with a static set of staging servers... very frustrating with a 50 person team.
Glad we're solving something that you empathize with. I'll never turn down a warm intro, so let me know if you think we'd be useful to any folks at your previous company.
The "spin-down" feature sounds like the killer -- the only reason we didn't have an environment per build already is because it would be cost prohibitive. Instead, we tried to time-slice with a static set of staging servers... very frustrating with a 50 person team.