

GridCentric (fork() for VMs) + Hudson = Elastic Build System - tsmith
http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/08/elastic-build-system-in-action.html

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jcromartie
Slightly off-topic, but I've been building my CI server by hand with Rake and
various shell/Ruby scripts. It's working OK but I wonder if I would gain
anything by moving to Hudson. I've heard a lot about it lately.

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dlsspy
buildbot is the lisp of CI systems.

That is to say, as a buildbot user/contributor I look at things like this and
say, ``Oh, yeah, we added latent slaves with an EC2 sample implementation
somewhere around the end of 2008/beginning of 2009.''

buildbot lacks a really awesome web interface, but I don't use that part very
much. It runs everywhere and does everything, so we end up having to focus
mostly on our actual software.

~~~
amscanne
But how do you ensure that your EC2 slaves have exactly the same
tools/libraries/environment as your blessed build machine? I'm guessing you
just have to carefully curate and update AMIs every single time you make a
change to the master. Chasing that stuff down is massively time-consuming.

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dlsspy
If I did it twice, I'd automate it.

I haven't made very many AMIs, but when I did, I got it down to a little shell
script that basically goes from a blank machine to me installing a few things
I needed, building some stuff I needed, uninstalling some other stuff and
uploading the images with roughly no effort on my part. The most painful part
was using the web console to launch instances and then wait for them.

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tsmith
This is an elaboration on Dave's earlier post here:
[http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/elastic-build-
system...](http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/elastic-build-systems.html)

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j_baker
This is a big deal. As your build process grows more complex, it can become a
very significant bottleneck.

~~~
tsmith
Thanks! Tell your friends! We're giving away fully-functional 60-day trial
licenses and there are a growing number of interesting use cases for VM clone:
<http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/search/label/recipes>

