My first reaction was also that the $129 price tag seems steep, but then I started doing the math: My guess is that if you want to go with EC2 on your own that it's approximately $50 per month cheaper than Solo (see http://tinyurl.com/2q4e3t for the AWS EC2 cost calculator).
However, my guess is that there is a significant number of of Rails hackers who would be better off spending those extra $50 to get going right away instead of messing around themselves trying to configure their EC2 instance.
Ezra mentions a lot of details in his introduction video on the EY site, such as a hardened and and pre-compiled nix packages (cough* rmagick), optimizing MySQL memory usage etc, knowledge they have built-up over the years within EY. Their knowledge is worth money.
The only problem I foresee for EY's Solo is that the 'end result' of an EC instance deployed by Solo is easily copied. All the knowledge poured into the configs are accessible by anyone with root access to the instance, and nothing prevents you from deploying the next instance completely yourself. But if the configuration management tools of Solo (and upcoming Flex) seriously rock than I doubt that this will be an attractive option.
Heroku is free. It's also easier and available right now. I uploaded the code for http://fuel.dustincurtis.com and it was working within 10 minutes.
For most of my little fun projects, I don't need an entire instance, and Solo is extremely expensive for that.
Also, I have a question for Engine Yard: why did you make the EC2 stuff transparent? One of the downsides of EC2 is that it has a very complicated pricing structure. The people Solo is targeting probably don't want to deal with a 20 row table of different prices.
The ec2 stuff is transparent because we aren't trying to hide the underlying platform. You can still utilize the full power of AWS form our system, you just don't have to unless you really want to. Sane defaults but major flexibility is one of the goals of this platform. That being said you may be right and we may need a tiered pricing system tha includes certain amounts of bandwidth and storage for a known monthly price. Time will tell as people start top use the platform.
Also you can run multiple applications on one solo instance. Since you have 1.7 gigs of ram you can run 3-6 little apps pretty easily if you use the apache + passenger stack.
Who else is saying, "YES YES YES YES YES YES YES"? haha
I am.
I think the beauty of Engine Yard and Heroku is that at some point in time, one of these two companies (or perhaps Google), will figure out a way to "just scale." At that point, web developers will just simply follow some basic guidelines and never worry about system administration again. I think that will be an extremely happy day for me.
compared to a standard $72/mon min EC2 instance (add maybe $15 for bandwidth), it is. I guess I'll have to try it and see how much the added tools are worth to me.
As a long time Engine Yard customer I can say $129 is a very good deal considering the level of support that brings you. We've run PMOG (http://pmog.com) on EngineYard from a small starting slice right up to a real application and I've found them to consistently be responsive, knowledgable and scale-able, if you see what I mean :)
I'd strongly recommend anyone checkout EY solo. Hearing about their plans flex, the ability to run with passenger and soon rack, should make you realise that they know how to handle Ruby.
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.
I don't know much about it (i.e. I haven't tried it yet) but from the documentation, it is EC2 but with a lot of 'sysadmin goodies' added on the top of it. Think of it as value-add to EC2.
To me this looks like Heroku but with more flexibility.
That is exactly what it seems like to me. A lot more turnkey than the rest. That being said, all that came to my mind was "when we get another round of funding...". A min of $129/month is a bit much right now.
However, my guess is that there is a significant number of of Rails hackers who would be better off spending those extra $50 to get going right away instead of messing around themselves trying to configure their EC2 instance.
Ezra mentions a lot of details in his introduction video on the EY site, such as a hardened and and pre-compiled nix packages (cough* rmagick), optimizing MySQL memory usage etc, knowledge they have built-up over the years within EY. Their knowledge is worth money.
The only problem I foresee for EY's Solo is that the 'end result' of an EC instance deployed by Solo is easily copied. All the knowledge poured into the configs are accessible by anyone with root access to the instance, and nothing prevents you from deploying the next instance completely yourself. But if the configuration management tools of Solo (and upcoming Flex) seriously rock than I doubt that this will be an attractive option.