Amazon EC2 + multiple environments (DEV, QA, PROD)

I'm about to start down a path of developing a public facing internet site and hosting it on Amazon's cloud and wanted to see how similar people were setting up their en. App 开发者_Go百科will be an asp.net front end with a sql backend.

Typically with other projects I'd set up 3 separate environments (DEV, QA, PROD, as identical as possible) and deploy the app to each. Since the cloud model is different from my typical on-premise enterprise clients, I was wondering what people are doing for their DEV/QA machines. Do most people do all their environments in the cloud? Is it OK to do DEV/QA on premise and then PROD is in the cloud? I do have to be concerned with budget so ideally i don't want to do everything in the cloud but if that is the best way then I can make cuts elsewhere.

I would give up Amazon EC2 manual install entirely and use AppHarbor service hosting.

I would say why, but all you need to do is reading my answer on other question

Real alternatives to Windows Azure PaaS (web role)?

It depends on how dependent your product is on the Amazon specific APIs. If you start using SimpleDB and SQS and so on then it becomes difficult to set up a dev environment outside of EC2 (though you can do it by providing alternate implementations). If you're running everything on one instance then you can get away with a local dev environment, though it's still useful and easy to use EC2 as a staging environment (just start up an identical instance with the same disk image). If you're somewhere in between, you can use a local cloud setup like Eucalyptus or OpenStack to test your environment locally, then stage to EC2 before deploying to production. One advantage to this in addition to cost savings is that it's generally much easier to test and debug locally where you don't have to deal with Internet latency and bandwidth limitations.

From personal experience, the more you can do locally, the better; just be sure to do final stage testing in the EC2 environment to prevent any unwelcome surprises.