Ask Slashdot: Do Any Development Shops Build-Test-Deploy On A Cloud Service?
bellwould (11363) writes "Our CTO has asked us to move our entire dev/test platform off of shared, off-site, hardware onto Amazon, Savvis or the like. Because we don't know enough about this, we're nervous about the costs like CPU: Jenkins tasks checks-out 1M lines of source, then builds, tests and test-deploys 23 product modules 24/7; as well, several Glassfish and Tomcat instances run integration and UI tests 24/7. Disk: large databases instances packed with test and simulation data. Of course, it's all backed up too. So before we start an in-depth review of what's available, what experiences are dev shops having doing stuff like this in the cloud?"
Atlassian is already trying to push their customers in this direction. Their Bamboo OnDemand offering spins up AWS instance as needed for builds. In this case, you could still host a local Bamboo instance and use elastic remote agents.
One thing I do like about this sort of setup is that it keeps you honest about deployment. Your build environment stands up a new instance every time your remote agent goes stale and is recovered to reduce costs.