The main difference is that ec2 and aws in general just gives you very low level building blocks. It gives you an api for 'give me a new server', 'attach an ip address', 'create a new volume', 'attach volume' etc. So you have to learn this stuff just to get your basic hardware in place. once you have that done you will still be faced with all the sysadmin tasks involved with configuring everything to mount and format these volumes and configure every service you need to run. Of course you need to know what the proper setup for a ruby app in production is and learn all the different webservers and monitoring tools.
The idea behind ey-solo(and the soon coming ey-flex) is that you don't want to have to learn all that stuff. We have been running and managing high volume ruby apps in production for 2.5 years now and we have taken our whole battle tested stack and are now offering it as SaaS.
So the goal is to save you time and hassle. We will maintain the whole stack with constant feature and security updates as well as bug fixes and all you need to do is write your app and leave the deployment and scaling hassles to us.
AWS is only the beginning, this platform will soon be available on other clouds as well as be downloadable so it can be run on any hosting provider if you run our linux and install our agent.
This means that eventually you will be able to host anywhere and still use our automated stack to manage the servers.
It's an interesting product, but personally (unless I misunderstood what I read) I'd rather have something that dealt with scaling on ec2 dynamically with multiple instances at a time and not just one ec2 instance with base config.
given my experience with slicehost, basic sysadmin isn't hard to learn; not to mention if you're using rails there's the deprec2 gem that can do most of baseline sysadmin tasks (if not all of it for you)
I agree with another post; something like heroku (with extras) is more desirable or a more economical rightscale
bottomline: not cheap enough given the alternatives, and it doesn't really give customers the main benefit of ec2 (compared to existing alternatives)
We have ey-flex coming in a few months. Flex is the multi slice clustered version of engineyard on AWS, replicated db's autoscaling app servers and load balancing, message queueing plus logging and monitoring aggregation services.
So the answer is yes you will be able to replicate a traditional EY cluster setup on AWS in a few months.
The idea behind ey-solo(and the soon coming ey-flex) is that you don't want to have to learn all that stuff. We have been running and managing high volume ruby apps in production for 2.5 years now and we have taken our whole battle tested stack and are now offering it as SaaS.
So the goal is to save you time and hassle. We will maintain the whole stack with constant feature and security updates as well as bug fixes and all you need to do is write your app and leave the deployment and scaling hassles to us.
AWS is only the beginning, this platform will soon be available on other clouds as well as be downloadable so it can be run on any hosting provider if you run our linux and install our agent.
This means that eventually you will be able to host anywhere and still use our automated stack to manage the servers.