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?"

50%+ cheaper not to use the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

[Ben Evans]

If it's all Java / JVM, then look at the Cloudbees offering, or the Waratek JVM (high-density) on something cheaper than EC2. Unless you have a decent grasp of when your environment can be shut down, EC2 is almost certain to be a waste of money, especially for dev / test.

Security concerns

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Lumpy]

"cloud makes it not matter where you're working from."

Competent IT and VPN does that as well.

How is it different?

[msobkow]

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..

[Slashdot Parent]

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?