I really like Amazon WebServices. I think they provide great and innovative features with an affordable price. I also like Engine Yard. Their plans are too expensive for most users but their commitment to a better open-source platform is remarkable. And I think they made a pretty interesting move in their new Solo offering.

Solo is an Engine Yard wrapper around AWS. Amazon is the cloud computing giant right now and they have a good service for good price. It would be very hard for a smaller company like Engine Yard to compete in price and infrastructure with them. What EY realized is that instead of competing with AWS they could offer inexpensive solutions that leverage the competitor’s infrastructure and still make some money. They branded Solo as entry-level and its price is pretty much half of their premium offering.

Amazon charges $0.10 per hour for a small instance, EY adds $0.08 to that and we end up with $0.18 per hour in Solo. What would one get for the extra 8 cents/hour?

If you want to deploy a system to Amazon you have to be spend some time in setup. You have to create an image to deploy or select one of the freely available options. It requires some knowledge of Linux, Ruby, networking and the like.

As the screencast shows, the deployment process of Rails applications is really simplified using Solo. The platform understands the tools commonly used by the Rails community and looks like if you don’t get too far away from this toolset it does most of the work needed to get a professional deployment up and running.

It is very unlikely that an experienced software developer would have too much trouble setting up an instance but one thing that I learned from Ruby on Rails communities and conventions is that the community is not composed only by experienced developers.

I have met a lot of entrepreneurs that just want a pragmatic (and inexpensive!) platform to develop and try their ideas and also met media people that create simple web sites for clients. Those guys enjoy the ease of Rails painless web development but will have a hard time trying to understand which firewall configuration to pick.

Even professional software developers can get benefit of this deployment. Recently I’ve been involved in some projects that deploy to AWS. At ThoughtWorks we have the skills required to fine tune our own EC2/S3 setup and create an optimised environment but we are just consultants. Our time is expensive and we will not be there forever.

If the client is a small start-up or a company that does not have a good development group it will be too hard for them to maintain that setup. As they lack the time and skills to manage that they would end up having to pay good money to someone to perform the most basic administration tasks. Solo has the potential to minimise the required effort and create a better experience for those clients. Next time I face something like that it will definitely be an option.