Develop in the cloud - what Red Hat and Amazon team-up means for developers

Red Hat announced the public beta of Amazon’s EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. While the features of Amazon EC2 are a very nice idea for the sysadmin side of the house, this is also a great benefit for developers.

For example, a distributed developer team can deploy a development infrastructure in the compute cloud. Put developer sandboxes, test harnesses, and release engineering entirely in EC2, only running what you need when you need it, then roll it over to production hosting.

Since this beta has just started, we don’t have any examples to highlight, but we’re looking. If you know of one, please send a letter to the editor.

Let’s not be full of hyperbole — this is not an instant-on solution the way traditional web-based software project hosting has been run. To put together a full devel infrastructure is going to require many of the same skills as if you did it in your own datacenter. The skills are still needed to put together proper QA and release engineering. But you can save in costs, headaches, and real estate. You can do it all without leasing a single square foot of office or datacenter space.

These are magic combinations coming together, an alignment of the stars that benefits developers the most:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (w/ virtualization and appliance OS)
+ JBoss technologies
+ compute (EC2) and storage (S3) in the cloud
+ skilled people
+ laptops
+ caffeine etc.
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Instant development team

This stands to do for development teams what the Internet originally did for virtual businesses. With an idea for a new application, form up a team of developers with laptops. Within 24 hours they are checking code into a complete development infrastructure.

If you don’t see your questions answered in the FAQ, send a letter to the editor and we’ll see about getting it answered.

This entry was posted by Karsten Wade on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 9:50 am and is filed under Web Services, Compute Cloud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.