Is grid/cloud computing development normally slow?

I spent 5 years working with soft real-time embedded systems, where incremental builds took about 5-15 minutes on average. I thought that was bad, but six months ago I left to join a travel IT company and found that it can take them a week or more to get even broken code into a test environment.

This delayed gratification is frustrating enough for me that I've begun looking for a new job, but I wonder: is this normal for grid/cloud computing development? Am I just not cut out for server-side computing?