Not to discourage you from playing with EC2--it's awesome and useful--but if you just want to spin up Rails or Node.js apps quickly, it may be easiest and most

Not to discourage you from playing with EC2--it's awesome and useful--but if you just want to spin up Rails or Node.js apps quickly, it may be easiest and most convenient to use Heroku[1]. They run on EC2 and manage load balancing, web-server setup, (some) databases for you. All you do is push from your git repo to their endpoint, and they take care of the staging and deploy for you. EC2 itself just provides blank virtual machines and gives you full control over them. At a high-level, you'll be setting up your web server and db, pulling your application code, and running it. It's really not too dissimilar from setting up your app on your local machine. The complexity around EC2 comes from the need to scale an application. Then you'll want to add load-balancers and more instances. While you can add these by the GUI console, you'll want to learn to use the EC2 Command Line tools[2] or the API via a library like Boto[3]. You may want to look through Amazon's suggested architectures to understand how to put these tools into play[4]. [1] http://www.heroku.com http://www.heroku.com [2] http://aws.amazon.com/developertools/351 http://aws.amazon.com/developertools/351 [3] https://github.com/boto/boto https://github.com/boto/boto [4] http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/ http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/