CITCON: Remote (Cruise)Control: Amazon EC2
Someone at CITCON (I’m pretty sure it was Mike) had a really good idea: use the service offered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run CruiseControl.
Basically, Amazon EC2 offers virtual machines where anything can be uploaded. No need for a physical machine anymore.
If we assume the equivalent of a machine with a 10 Gigs hard drive running 12 hours a day with 5 Gigs of daily traffic (probably vastly more than necessary), the monthly cost would be around:
10 Gigs x 0.15$ + 12 hours x 30 days x 0.10$ + 5 Gigs x 30 days x 0,2$ = 67.5$
Less than 70US$ per month! That’s what it would cost to run a full-fledged machine running CruiseControl. And it appears easy to upgrade to more instances.
This could lead to very innovative usages. For example, as a consultancy, you could setup your system remotely, and get ready as soon as you move to the client site. As a service company, you could easily scale as your customer base grows.
Of course, the main limitation I see is that most companies would be very reluctant to open their local environment to external resources…
I have an older post on CITCON.

[...] I have older posts on CITCON. Business Broker [...]
Pingback by ericonline » CI and offshore — October 13, 2006 @ 2:06 pm
[...] This is also a valid alternative to Amazon EC2 for cheap hosting. Business Broker [...]
Pingback by ericlefevre » Healthy Competition in Dedicated Server Hosting — January 5, 2007 @ 3:36 pm
[...] I have older posts on CITCON. [...]
Pingback by ericlefevre » CI and offshore — September 10, 2007 @ 4:44 pm