Here are packer and terraform scripts that that you can use to run cost-effective experiments with large FoundationDB clusters on AWS: github.com/bitgn/fdb-cloud-test.
The process involves the following steps:
- Create AMI images for your setup, installing necessary software. This is usually done once.
- Use terraform to spin up FoundationDB and tester machines out of these AMI images.
- Run experiments and benchmarks
- Tear down the cluster
Once the AMI images is “baked” and added to the AWS account, it usually takes 3-4 minutes to create a cluster and a few minutes to tear it down. Since AWS charges per second, you can have experiment even with a large cluster without spending a lot of money.
I use similar scripts to benchmark performance of FoundationDB layers in various configurations.