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It would have taken 30 hours to generate the files without using EC2. I wonder how long it took to set up everything to do them in an hour, and whether it was worth it. It seems quite a complex set of tools for a simple task.

Perhaps just splitting the 3600 files into four sets and starting them off manually on manually created instances might have been quicker overall?

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The client was slow in delivering the data and we needed it within 48 hours, with the possibility of generating the output multiple times to discover any errors or other issues.

That was my first thought as well. But I guess it depends on how often they need to update things. It might be quite nice to be able to deploy design tweaks in an hour rather than 30.

But if this was a one off or very infrequent then I think you're probably right. Just leaving it running over a weekend might have been better. But then they wouldn't have got to play with the shiny new tools :)

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