I am working on a rails-based project that we have decided to host in the cloud. We have decided to go with Amazon Web Services. We will be using EC2 and with an Elastic IP. We are looking into Cloudfront as well. So far I have created my account and launched my instance which was based on Webficients prebuilt Ubuntu image. It is geared towards rails apps with Passenger and MySQL already installed. It also has enterprise ruby which I will look into when I have more time. So after configuring my keys, I was able to ssh into the server and poke around. My next step is to get the command line tools installed and configured. Then I hope to my image customized and save it. Since server admin isn’t really my expertise, I am hoping this image will help me automate a lot of it. I can simply relaunch a new instance as needed with my preconfigured AMI and off I go. At least I hope it will be that easy, we shall see.