My experience is with AWS. I assume Microsoft has similar offerings, but I don’t have experience with Azure.
AWS has on-demand EC2 instances which you pay for only the actual time that they are running.[1] Instances can be started and stopped via command line (or via the web interface) as long as you have valid credentials to do so. For example: an m5.4xlarge instance has 16 cores and costs about $1.5 per hour. On a machine like that, a full build would probably take less than 10 minutes. It’s probably possible to do a full release with only a few hours of server time. Leaving a server like that running all the time would get expensive, but if it’s just spun up for releases, you’d get very fast builds at a reasonable price. I’d be happy to pay $10-$50 (and possibly more) per release to make the release process painless for the RM. [1]https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ <https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/> > On Apr 12, 2020, at 7:45 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com.INVALID> wrote: > > I'm not very experienced with spinning up servers. The CI server we are > using is effectively free, based on a generous donation from Microsoft of > MSDN accounts to ASF committers. So I leave it up 24/7, and share the RDP > access on private@. I think any other ASF committer could do the same. > IIRC, if that server actually is stopped, I have to use my personal > (unshared) MSDN credentials to start it again. AIUI, if I actually paid for > the server, it would cost me to leave it running even if it didn't run jobs > between releases. > > Is that what you are basically saying? I think it might be best if another > committer got a CI server going via the MS donation and could leave it up > 24/7. > > -Alex > > On 4/12/20, 9:28 AM, "Harbs" <harbs.li...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I’m willing to do this. > > Considering that the release will be run infrequently, it should be doable > to have a relatively powerful server that could be spun up on demand. This is > something I have setup for my own releases. > > The only complication would be that each RM would need valid credentials > to spin up the server. > > Harbs > >> On Apr 12, 2020, at 7:10 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com.INVALID> wrote: >> >> A better solution, IMO, is for someone else to offer up a CI server only for >> release jobs. > > >
