Conclusion

Development and test practices require certain resources at certain times for the development cycle. In traditional environments, those resources might not be available at all, or not in the necessary timeframe. When those resources are available, they provide a fixed amount of capacity that is either insufficient (especially in variable activities like testing), or wasted (but paid for) when the resources are not used. For more information, see the Auto Scaling documentation.

AWS offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional development and test infrastructures. Instead of waiting weeks or even months for hardware, you can instantly provision resources, scale up as the workload grows, and release resources when they are no longer needed.

Whether development and test environments consist of a few instances or hundreds, whether they are needed for a few hours or 24/7, you still pay only for what you use. AWS is a programming-language and operating system−agnostic platform, and you can choose the development platform or programming model used in your business. This flexibility enables you to focus on your project, not on operating and maintaining your infrastructure.

AWS also enables possibilities that are difficult to realize with traditional hardware. You can fully automate resources on AWS so that environments can be provisioned and decommissioned without human intervention. You can start development environments on-demand; kick off builds when needed, unconstrained by the availability of resources; provision test resources; and automatically orchestrate entire test runs or campaigns.

AWS offers you the ability to experiment and iterate with a rapidly changeable infrastructure. Your project teams are free to use inexpensive capacity to perform any kind of tests or to experiment with new ideas, with no upfront expenses or long-term commitments, making AWS a platform of choice for development and test.