Question

I was reading up on Amazon s ec2. And I think that apart from the usual uses: hosting stuff, servers, etc, it could also be used for hosting your development environment.

Benefits:

Being able to log on from any computer and start developing
Works even on the weakest of atom notebooks.
Easy options like making snapshots and clones of your dev environment. (When trying out new visual studio releases for instance)

Is anyone developing like this already? And if so, what are the practicalities of it?

p.s. I know there is a similar question, but they were all related to editing inside a browser and/or SSH ing and doing console work. I m more looking for the full RDP experience where with fullscreen you don t even notice you re on a different computer (Apart from a bit of lag here and there)

Answer 1

I ve done something similar- full remote development at a datacenter. The hardest part is moving files around, but if you have VPN or other direct file access, it s not so bad. I hosted an SVN server alongside the remote dev environment, so I could keep things synced up if I wanted to do local dev, grab copies, etc.

The biggest gripe I had was the occasional lag, and the lack of (good) multimonitor support. Win7 s RDP client has made some strides here.

Go for it.

Answer 2

Rightscale have a recorded webinar called "Why You Should Move Dev & Test to the Cloud". You can watch it in full from this Link.

This was the agenda of the webinar:

How cloud computing can increase development productivity.
Financial opportunity by leveraging cloud computing in dev/test.
Integrating cloud computing with the existing development environment and processes.
Walkthrough of RightScale best practices.
Use your organization s own environment to evaluate financial and productivity opportunity.

Answer 3

Since it s a community wiki I can add an answer as well I guess.

I was thinking that the price too might be a point to consider. EC2 is not that cheap. I think it boils down to $1000 a year. If you can get your boss to pay that or if you own your own company it won t be too much of a problem maybe.

Second point, is privacy. One should never forget that people at Amazon (or anywhere else) can look along what you are typing. Of course, your ISP can already read along with your Email. But still, it s a point to consider.

Third point... What does sound sooo nice is that I ve never have to set up a dev environment ever again.

Oops...dropped my computer... Get another one, RDP, and away I go.

Oh, I only have a Mac. Don t care... RDP and go!

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