What are the quintessential tools and resources for hosting Rails applications on Amazon's EC2?

Question

I'm looking for:

• documentation
• blogs
• books
• ready-to-use pre-configured slice images
• services
• wrappers
• libraries
• tutorials

...anything that would make it easier to start using EC2 to host a Rails application.

Answer 1

There is a Rails image for EC2 at http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/

Answer 2

ElasticFox is a must have utility for overseeing your instances http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=609

Capazon is an awesome utility to bring instance management into Capistrano http://soylentfoo.jnewland.com/articles/2007/03/27/capazon-capistrano-meets-amazon-ec2 (there is a newer version out somewhere)

I like these AMI's (I dig Ubuntu) http://alestic.com/

If you're using Heroku or EngineYard (the main cloud hosting solutions today - they build on top of Amazon EC2) you can also use git to manage your code and both Heroku and EngineYard have great instructions on how to use integrate git with them:

Heroku: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/git

Engine Yard: http://docs.engineyard.com/host-your-code-on-github.html

Answer 3

Have you looked at the amazon getting started tutorial? It is sufficient to put an ec2 instance together.

I did use it to setup an ubuntu server with ruby-enterprise, rails and passenger (this part was not any different from any other ubuntu server I use)

Answer 4

I highly recommend Scott Chacone's Fuzed and EC2 demo. Other's recommend the EC2 docs, I will as well. Be sure to also check out the fuzed code. The performance is amazing but you better be bringing in some money to support it.

Answer 5

And don't forget SimpleDeployr, one click Ruby on Rails deployment to your EC2 account.

Answer 6

Here's a service you might want to try out to deploy your Rails app using EC2: Morph AppSpace

Answer 7

I have been configuring a rails app to run directly on EC2 using EC2onRails and its corresponding ami. I've documented my progress here, because I found the other documentation out there lacking:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~silver/ec2.html