Computer hardware has traditionally been a scarce, expensive resource. In the early days of computing developers had to share a single machine. Today, each developer usually has their own machine but it’s rare for a developer to have more than one. This means that running performance tests often involves scavenging for machines. Likewise, replicating even just part of a production environment is a major undertaking. With Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), however, things are very different. A set of Linux servers is now just a web service call away. Depending on the type of the servers you simply pay 10-80 cents per server per hour for up to 20 servers! No more upfront costs or waiting for machines to be purchased and configured.

In this presentation you will learn about EC2Deploy, which is an open-source framework that I've developed for deploying an enterprise Java application on a set of Amazon EC2 servers. We will talk about how to use EC2 to boost developer productivity and reduce hardware cost. You will learn how developers and testers can use EC2 for load testing and exploring failover scenarios. We will also discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using EC2 and other Amazon ‘web services’ such as the Simple Storage Service (S3) in your production environment. You will also hear about our experiences writing the EC2 deployment framework in Groovy.

You can download the slides from here: presentation (pdf).