GridCentric (fork() for VMs) + Hudson = Elastic Build System
blog.gridcentriclabs.com
blog.gridcentriclabs.com
That is to say, as a buildbot user/contributor I look at things like this and say, ``Oh, yeah, we added latent slaves with an EC2 sample implementation somewhere around the end of 2008/beginning of 2009.''
buildbot lacks a really awesome web interface, but I don't use that part very much. It runs everywhere and does everything, so we end up having to focus mostly on our actual software.
I haven't made very many AMIs, but when I did, I got it down to a little shell script that basically goes from a blank machine to me installing a few things I needed, building some stuff I needed, uninstalling some other stuff and uploading the images with roughly no effort on my part. The most painful part was using the web console to launch instances and then wait for them.