Running builds in the cloud

Question

I was wondering if anybody out there is doing their software builds using something like Amazon's EC2. I was thinking about trying to move our builds into that environment. Right now our builds are serial but only because we don't have enough computers to run all the components in parallel. Using EC2 we could create 50 or so computers, run them for a few minutes in massive parallel and then send the build results back to our site. Once we're done we could shutdown or destroy the machines. This would save us a bunch of time since the bottle neck is really the builds and not the size of the results.

Is anybody else doing this? Can you offer any advice?

Answer 1

My company runs our build system on EC2; we have a much smaller setup than the one you're talking about, but we have a build controller instance running Hudson which kicks off builds on a separate, clean instance and then distributes the build artifacts to our repository server (which also happens to be on EC2)

Using a cloud solution is ideal for what you're describing, since you can spin up the build servers only when you need them and be confident of building from a fixed baseline each time. The only downside I can think of is the build time; an EC2 instance can take up to 10 minutes to start up, so you either have to add that on to your total build time or keep the build servers running continuously.