The traditional continuous integration (CI) is another gray area for developers. CI servers typically consist of a master and slave setup. The master(s) controls the builds, or how to run the tests or commands, and the slaves execute them.

The fantastic thing about Cloud infrastructure, as we have discussed many times, is the ability to spin up instances as needed and terminate them when we are done with them. This gives us a very unique opportunity: ad-hoc CI slaves.

Using Cloud infrastructure we most likely should have the master running 24/7. This prevents us from having gaps in commits. If there are no agents available, the builds will stay in a queue of some sort. The agents, however, can be Cloud agents and spun up as needed.

Perhaps we deploy an application that can be installed on both CentOS and Ubuntu platforms. From the master, we could have a build configuration that uses a pre-built AMI for both of these operating systems so that we can test and build on...