Severe floods hit Australia hard in late December 2010, causing billions of dollars in damage and priceless life losses. As a response to this massive disaster the Government of Queensland ran a national telethon to receive donations for the flood victims. Problem was, they were not ready for that kind of load.

In this talk I'll show you how we leveraged the cloud to build the telethon's donation app in 48 hours, generating over $30 million in donations - despite all skepticism!

Along the way, I'll also discuss tricks and catches one should be aware of when working with a PaaS provider such as Heroku. If you're not sure how serious you can get in the cloud this talk will change your mind.