Cloud-based build service

Building binary packages for software products, particularly large-scale software products, is a highly computation intensive process. Thus, it is desirable to distribute the workload over a large number of computing nodes so as to have the build process complete in an optimal period of time. One environment providing compute resources that can be utilized for a highly available and dynamically scalable distributed build process is an elastic compute cloud. In such an environment, virtual machines can be instantiated and destroyed as the resource requirements of the build process dictate. This has the advantage that dedicated hardware is unneeded, and excess capacity on the hardware employed can be employed for other computation tasks when the build process is idle. Presented herein are systems, methods and computer storage media for distributing a highly available and scalable build service, suitable for use in an elastic compute environment or other distributed environment.