As a TFS consultant, I need to know everything there is to know about the product. I really didn’t want to spend $1,000+ on hardware to have it running all the time, so I looked into using Amazon Web Services. I had a little trepidation because I really didn’t know how much money it was going to cost me, but I figured “what the heck” and gave it a try. Here are my results or more specifically my first month’s bill:
This comes out to $10.18, which really isn’t that bad. I tried the small instance first, but it didn’t have enough RAM, so I went with the more costly Large Instance. This was plenty of firepower. As I recall, it had about 6 GB of RAM and multiple cores. I put SharePoint 2010, TFS 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2 on it and everything ran smoothly. I am thinking of bundling the Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) to make it easier for others to get started. Please contact me or leave a comment if you’re interested.
Woody Press 
Does it make sense to run TFS in the cloud? I suppose to be frugal you could turn the machine on only when checking in code. Is there a “sleep” mode for EC2?
That’s a good question. For certain things, like build machines, I think it definitely makes sense. Only spin up build agents when you need them. Same with test agents. As for the App Tier and Data Tier of TFS; I think it depends on the amount of users you will have and how much you would like to invest in disaster recovery. Many variables to consider…
Yes, there is a sleep mode. It works awesome. Also command line (JCL) and .net interfaces to run a VERY robust api against your instances, storage, etc.
Did you set up secure access? If so, did you use a VPN setup, or ISA?
No, I didn’t get that far 😦 Either way it’s going to be difficult. VPN setup takes configuring your on-site firewall with their vpn. They have documentation for Juniper and Cisco devices as I recall; but not being a network engineer…. I didn’t venture that far 🙂
I installed TFS on Amazon Cloud but can’t access it’s web portal from any machine except for this cloud machine. Even on the cloud machine I can’t get access to TFS via its public IP address. What I’m supposed to do with this issue?
I do not provide free tech support.
We ended up using Amazon’s VPC offering, and so far it’s looking good. Connecting our Juniper was a bit of a challenge, but it looks like a good solution.
Awesome! Good to hear!
Did you ever bundle that AMI? Would come in very handy… thanks!
Unfortunately, no. Maybe I should sell it?? 🙂