Where can I get a one-off server of Active Directory for Developing against?

Question

We're not a windows shop, but one of our products is going to need to optionally integrate with Active Directory - things like SSO etc.

I'd really rather not go through the rigamarole of setting up a whole server just to develop against it and then leave it hanging around for testing purposes.

Is there a simple cloud-based service where I can purchase a server running active directory for a month or two just for development purposes? I looked into Amazon EC2 but it looks like you may still need to go through a significant set up (I may be wrong on this).

Answer 1

I think you want AD Lightweight Directory Service. You can run it on any server without going through the whole AD setup/hardening process. You won't be able to use all of the AD tools against it (Users and Computers, and Trusts MMC plugins), but it will behave like AD for prototyping and development. If you see posts about ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode), AS LDS is just the latest name of the same idea.

Answer 2

Even if you find a provider that can do hosted AD, I don't know if you'll be able to avoid the setup and configuration that goes along with it. Active Directory can be configured in so many different ways that adequately testing against it really demands more than just a default, vanilla AD domain. (I've had to deal with far too many applications that made unwarranted assumptions about how Active Directory is structured, and it's infuriating. Accounts aren't always in the default "Users" container! You can have multiple domains in a forest! Sometimes the CN isn't the userid! Aargh!)

Anyway... if you really do want to host AD on a cloud service, it can be done, but it's rare, and it sounds like it's fragile. Here's a link to a discussion on the Amazon Web Services developer forum about using AD on EC2:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?messageID=150845

The document provided by garysu22 looks particularly useful, but it's also 25 pages of tweaks and workarounds... so again, lots of setup and configuration.

By the way, I'm concerned that Amazon's whitepaper on hosting AD on EC2, which used to be here...

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=2435

...seems to have gone missing. I'm not sure what that means, but it would make me nervous.

(EDIT: I'm not the only one: http://justinbrodley.com/?p=60)

Now for an answer to a question you didn't ask...

I've developed against Active Directory very successfully using a local virtual machine running Windows Server and AD. I highly recommend it. You'll need a reasonably powerful machine with plenty of memory and storage, of course, but any modern development box should handle it without breaking a sweat.

With this sort of setup, you get all the niceties of a VM environment, like snapshot and rollback (so you can break stuff, even deliberately, and fix it quickly) and easy network isolation (you can make the VM visible to just the host dev box, for example)... and you can make the entire thing go away when you don't need it by just suspending the VM.

Of course, you'll still have to go through the initial AD setup and configuration, but for the kind of AD setup(s) you'll need, that's pretty easy. If you're going to be doing any serious development against AD, that's valuable experience you'll want to have anyway. Active Directory is its own sort of beast, with more than its fair share of idiosyncrasies; the better you understand it, the happier your customers will be.

Good luck!