Using The Amazon EC2 Cloud For Test Tool Experimentation

I recently went to an Amazon Web Services event and heard from several companies on how they use the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Although each company described how they were using Amazon EC2 to deliver product and services, they also stressed the convenience and cost-effectiveness of using Amazon EC2 to experiment, whether it was with new designs or just to try out open source test tools. They described how difficult it was, within their companies, to ask for and provision a physical server. But with Amazon EC2, they could literally press a button (if you use Elasticfox) and almost instantly have access to a server of their choosing, e.g. Ubuntu, Red Hat, Windows, etc. And all for as low as $0.10 per hour!

We discovered the benefits of using Amazon EC2 over a year ago and have been creating and working with Amazon Machine Instances, or AMIs, ever since.  It's great to be able to bring up different versions of the various linux servers, and then install open source test tools on them.  There's no fear of messing up a server that may be used by others, and if we don't like the way a tool works, or find ourselves dealing with too many installation errors, we just kill the AMI and boot up another.  And, if we end up with something that really works well, we bundle it up and save it as a "testlabs.com" AMI that we own and can use anytime we want.

An example of this occurred when we wanted to learn more about Apache JMeter and how it could be used for load testing. We first created an AMI with our preferred linux distro and then began experimenting with different JMeter installs.  We learned a lot from that experiment and ended up creating an Apache JMeter AMI that is available to anyone with an Amazon Web Services account.  It's free to use, meaning you don't pay anything above what Amazon charges for use of AMIs in their cloud (starting at $0.10 per hour).  If you'd like to give it a try, you can find it here: Ubuntu 8.10 Server w/ Apache JMeter.