Amazon EC2 Integration

Situation

Set up QuickBuild the same as tutorial One Build For One Agent, except that build agents should be started in EC2 as necessary. Launched build agents should be able to be closed if they are idle for specified amount of time to save cost.

Resolution

1. Set up QuickBuild according to resolution section of tutorial One Build For One Agent.
2. Login to QuickBuild as administrator and switch to administration menu, then follow the plugin management link, and edit plugin setting of Amazon EC2 Plugin to provide a file containing your EC2 access keys.
3. Create appropriate build agent AMI following [this guide](Launch Node in EC2.html#LaunchNodeinEC2-createbuildagentAMI) if necessary.
4. Switch to grid page and follow the Cloud Profiles link to bring out the cloud profiles page. Add a cloud profile with node launch setting specified as Launch Node into Amazon EC2 and fill relevant EC2 node launch options. Specifically the AMI ID should be filled with the identifier of the build agent AMI you created previously.
5. QuickBuild will proceed to do a test launch of your defined cloud profile to grab system/user attribute of node launched by your profile. Grabbed system/user attributes will be used afterwards to match against node matcher setting of build steps to determine which profile has to be used to launch node if no active agents satisfy the criteria. Only after test launch the profile can be used by builds to launch node on demand. Normally the test launch should be done in two or three minutes, if it takes too long, please check instance status as well as agent log at EC2 side.
6. Now run the build. If configured correctly, QuickBuild will launch build agent using your defined cloud profile to run the build. By default the launched build agent will stay active for 30 minutes before terminating. If more builds are set to run in the same time, more agents will be launched to accommodate the concurrency. You may check all launched instances by examining the active launched nodes tab of certain cloud profile, and may manually terminate them there.