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.