Public Clouds

July 14, 2009 — Martin Van Ryswyk

Today we announced integrations and compatibility with public cloud computing – specifically Amazon EC2. Cloud computing is a hot topic right now, and rightly so. It provides an easy to deploy, cost-effective, scalable, on-demand computing infrastructure –very timely, given shrinking or frozen IT budgets. I can’t count the number of customers who tell me that compute infrastructure is their #1 bottleneck. At Electric Cloud we have years of experience with internal or “private” clouds (after all, it’s in our name). We help customers set up private clouds, some with hundreds of machines, to accelerate and automate their software build and test tasks. It made sense for us to add public clouds to the mix. You can read the press release here.

Our customers gave us some interesting use cases for using our products in combination with the public cloud. Here are some of their ideas:

Do everything in the cloud! SCM, build machines, acceleration, testing, everything!

System testing: Build the product in house and upload the installation program to the cloud. Silently install the product and import test data. Now beat it up with load testing, performance testing and UI testing. Automatically collect the results and then throw away the test machines. Oh yeah, do it at 3am when I am asleep.

Run continuous integration just to detect build failures. The artifacts are ignored, this is just an “early warning” system for build failures.

Quickly provision combinations of components for compatibility testing. For instance: Web server with Apache Version 2 and PHP 5 on CentOS 4, Database Server with MySql 5.2 on Windows. Now do it again with 50 different combinations of application and operation system versions.

Make build or test resources available to remote teams affordably and quickly via the cloud. Support an offshore team or a small number of developers in remote (or home) offices.

We can now do all of this. What can you imagine?

Agile development processes are now the norm rather than the exception. Why not an agile development infrastructure too? Our new integration gives you the ability to use just the build and test machines you need whether they are physical, virtual, or in a public cloud.