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.
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