Engine Yard Solo vs. EC2onRails: Pay Engine Yard extra or do it yourself?

Engine Yard is well known in the Rails community for their expertise in deploying and scaling Rails applications. When Engine Yard recently introduced Engine Yard Solo, I was very interested since I have been using the open source project EC2onRails. In particular, I wondered if you should pay Engine Yard for the Solo product when you can get EC2 running on your own for free. (excluding Amazon EC2 charges.)

After hours of testing and analysis, I have decided that the answer depends upon your skill level. Read on for the details.

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Performance Testing, Rails Amazon EC2, EC2, EC2onRails, Engine Yard, Nginx, Passenger, Performance Testing, Rails, Ruby on Rails

EC2onRails - 2 Small Instances or 1 High-CPU Medium Instance?

I recently watched the excellent RailsLab videos on tuning and optimizing Rails applications. One of the videos suggests that a great way to scale a Rails application is to separate the web and database components onto separate machines. We have been happily using Amazon’s EC2 system for about a year. Amazon’s recent introduction of the High-CPU Instance (High-CPU) made me curious how it would perform when compared against two Small Instances in a cluster (Cluster), since they would cost the same.

You will be happy to know that after hours of rigorous testing, I have identified a clear winner. Read on for the details.

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