Electric Cloud floats into Amazon's EC2

Electric Cloud has modified its build-automation and performance tools to work natively in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment, opening the cloud to development and test teams.

EC2 integration has been added to the feature set of ElectricCommander, a Web-based application that automates build test deployment, and ElectricAccelerator, a solution that executes builds in parallel across clusters and can now run natively in EC2.

ElectricCommander is now capable of starting and stopping virtual machines, and adding storage in the Amazon environment, said Martin Van Ryswyk, vice president of engineering at Electric Cloud.

ElectricCommander can run as a service hosted in EC2, bringing the build test release process to the cloud. Customers that run ElectricCommander in the cloud will pay the same licensing costs as they do presently to run it on-premises, he said.

"The cloud is a natural fit for dev and test," he said, explaining that some companies, typically small startups, are already running their applications in the cloud, and that it makes no sense for them to have an extra machine room in the building when the product itself is running somewhere else. Other companies can use the cloud to augment peak usage, or as an alternative to setting up a VPM to access the corporate data center or duplicating data centers, he said.