Using AWS EC2 instances for large builds

I experimented a few years ago with using EC2 spot instances (virtual server on the internet, but using unused server capacity). It was fairly successful, being able to run large calculations that should have taken weeks in a matter of days.

Since I started at my current job I’ve been running into building increasingly complex yocto images which keeps growing in size, at this point most images I build can take up to 6-7 hours to build on my laptop. This is an i7-4558U 2.8GHz cpu and 8 gigs of RAM so it’s not bad really, just not enough for these types of builds.

Again I started experimenting and I am really happy and impressed. So far all experiments are for open source projects etc, so nothing that has any non-disclosure agreements or corporate etc etc, I’d like to but this isn’t up to me really. I’ve setup an AMI on EC2 which I can instantiate and have up and running in 2-3 minutes, and then mount a 100 gig EBS volume where I store the sources and build data.

The same build that generally takes up to 6 hours on my laptop takes approximately 30-40 minutes on an EC2 c4.4xlarge machine (16 cores and 32 gigs ram).

My key findings so far is:

  1. Keep an AMI with all the build tools necessary/or script the setup.
  2. Keep an EBS volume with the long term stored data, gits etc for building and mount somewhere suitable in the AMI.
  3. Keep a micro instance (these are free/very cheap) around for mounting the EBS volume when you just want to check stuff out, mess around etc but not make builds.

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