With Amazon’s Spot Instance pricing model, National Instruments can run internal workloads at a fraction of the price of on-demand processing, saving the company tens of thousands of dollars as it tests new features. “With Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, we easily save 85–90 percent in costs,” says Gardner. “That, in turn, allows us to experiment with less risk and ultimately develop higher-quality products for our customers.”

NI has also saved the cost of building out a larger on-premises infrastructure. For example, the LabVIEW team has used Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to run more than 30,000 server-hours of test builds each month. Handling that amount of work on premises would have required doubling the size of the team’s internal infrastructure at a cost of $1 million in hardware and maintenance costs. Using AWS allowed NI to quickly scale to meet current demands while avoiding additional headcount and procurement lag associated with expanding on-premises infrastructure.

Running its development and test workloads on AWS has also made NI more agile. Because test workloads vary significantly during the software development lifecycle, NI can avoid the costs associated with idle servers at times when fewer tests are required. Similarly, the company can quickly scale up as the need for testing increases, obtaining the computing capacity it needs to rapidly analyze new features and release them to customers. For the development of one of its features, for example, the FPGA team needed to complete a comprehensive testing process that included more than 900 compiles. Had the team conducted these compiles using a single server on premises, they would have taken more than three weeks. But with Amazon EC2 Spot instances and parallelization, the team was able to complete these tests in under 10 hours at a cost of less than $50 per run. “Using AWS has shaved months off of the development cycle,” Gardner says. “If I need more servers, I can access them, no questions asked.”

NI has been able to pass this agility on to its customers. With the FPGA Compile Cloud Service completely on AWS, engineers can use the service as needed without spending thousands of dollars on their own hardware. “In the past, our customers could spend $5,000 to $10,000 for the compile servers they needed, only for them to sit idle a few months later,” says Gardner. “Since performing compiles is a feast-or-famine process, AWS is a good match for what we do.”

As NI continues to grow, the company plans to expand the use of AWS to other development environments. In addition, it is considering the use of additional AWS services such as

AWS IoT and Amazon QuickSight to create new product offerings for its customers. “AWS has allowed for a lot more experimentation,” says Gardner. “It gives us a large array of tools to work with, and it speeds up the development and deployment of new products, which is key to the success of our company.”