Armen has a blog post up about the cost savings Mozilla has been able to realize in its continuous integration infrastructure in Amazon over just the last 3 months. This has been a bit of a sea change for release engineering, who have historically been conservative with regards to changing core infrastructure and practices. We’re all coming to grips with the new world order, but I’m quite excited about the possibilities.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations based on other recent numbers from Armen:

• starting with a low-ball estimate of 7,000 pushes/month, if we project the rate of spending from December ($19/push) over an entire year, we end up with $1,596,000.
• at the new rate ($6/push), a year of AWS time will cost only $504,000.
• that’s a yearly savings of $1,092,000.

If history has taught us anything, continued growth will eat in to at least part of that savings, but think of what Mozilla could do with an extra million dollars. Depending on where we hire them, that money could easily buy 5-10 more engineers to continue driving the mission forward.

http://coop.deadsquid.com/2014/04/if-i-had-a-million-dollars/