I am using EC2 to host my soon-to-launch Quizical.net application. Its great.

I use capistrano to manage these EC2 instances. With these tasks, I have automated many sets of EC2 commands into simple rake tasks.

For instance, to launch an instance, I can type…

rake ec2:run id=ami-61a54008

. ..and a minute or two later I have a new instance running.

Then to install my rails app, I type…

cap initial_install

…which

• patches this instance with things I need;
• starts my litespeed web server;
• installs my app from subversion;
• creates my databases;
• writes my database.yaml
• runs my migrations
• imports my database from S3
• restarts my server

So in a few minutes, I’ve got my app running on a newly commissioned server! Awesome.