Ask Slashdot: Do Any Development Shops Build-Test-Deploy On A Cloud Service? 119
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?"
50%+ cheaper not to use the cloud (Score:2, Insightful)
It is 50%+ cheaper if you use in-house hardware. This assumes that you are a trained system administrator and you purchase energy and cost efficient hardware. Also, your data will be yours and not Amazons.
EC2 likely too expensive.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Security concerns (Score:3, Insightful)
If the stuff (data, processes, etc.) you put in the cloud are in any way sensitive, I would be very hesitant to put that in the hands of another company because of privacy and security. Particularly depending on your terms of service agreements with your users. I would avoid putting your source control system in the cloud too because then it's more accessible by nefarious actors than if it's locked down internally. This is of course assuming you have good security standards and practices in place.
Re:We do (Score:5, Insightful)
"cloud makes it not matter where you're working from."
Competent IT and VPN does that as well.
How is it different? (Score:5, Insightful)
When working for companies, everything was "in the cloud" already: on remote servers. It's not like I was running the stuff on my desktop.
SSH to Amazon or SSH to a box in the closet. Pretty much no difference to me.
Re:EC2 likely too expensive.. (Score:4, Insightful)
EC2 likely too expensive.. [...] If it's all Java / JVM, then look at the Cloudbees offering
You do realize that Cloudbees runs in EC2, right?