Advice on migrating data-heavy build configs to the cloud

Hi there,

We currently run a local TC installation across a small number of PCs. The projects they build have an initial sync from source control which adds up to several gigabytes of data, and the first build has to process that data, which can take an hour or so. (The projects are videogames, made in the Unity engine).

Subsequent builds are pretty quick, as generally there's little new data to sync, and the processed data is all cached locally on the agent.

Recently one of our build agents suffered a major hardware failure, and before I replace it I want to see if now's the time to move our agents onto AWS (or similar). What's not clear to me is the best way to do it. It seems like TC has a bunch of tech that can spin up an agent image in the cloud quickly, but in our case I don't think that's reasonable as it would then need to sync and process the data, so the benefits of caching would be lost. I guess the agent image could include the pre-synced and processed data, but that would make the image huge and it'd need updating regularly otherwise it'd be very out of date.

I think ideally what I'd want would be something like an agent image with a basic setup, but which when it was spun up on AWS was kept around permanently. That'd give us the flexibility to easily spin up new agents to increase capacity in the future, but would avoid the costs of having to constantly pull the whole project from source control and process all of the data.

Is there any support for that, or is it something I'd need to set up myself? Any thoughts or advice on any of the above would be most welcome!

Thanks,

Rob.